Work-From-Home is Unfair to Employees Who Can’t Afford It: Elon Musk

Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in Washington, D.C., on March 9, 2020. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Industrialist Elon Musk has criticized work-from-home arrangements, claiming it was unfair to employees who cannot access such options while at the same time being less productive compared to working from an office.

“The laptop class is living in la la land,” Musk said in an interview with CNBC on May 16. The billionaire insisted that it was wrong for some employees to have the option of working from home while others who work in places like factories or shops are mandated to attend the workplace. “I kind of think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘let them eat cake.’ It’s like, really, you’re gonna work from home, and you’re gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory.”

“The people who make your food that gets delivered, they can’t work from home. The people who come fix your house, they can’t work from home. But you can? Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up.”

Musk is a “big believer” in in-office productivity. He agreed with the host’s assessment that work-from-home impacts people’s ability to learn.

Musk also made it clear that those who wish to work at his companies like SpaceX, Tesla, or Twitter will have to be at the workplace regularly.

“Yes, I’m saying, like, look, put 40 hours in. And frankly, it doesn’t even need to be like, you know, Monday through Friday. Work Monday through Thursday. I think people should take vacations. I work seven days a week. But I’m not expecting others to do that.”

The Productivity Debate

Whether work-from-home boosts or reduces productivity is a hotly debated topic, with some research showing that it raises productivity.

A two-year study of more than 800,000 employees working at Fortune 500 firms found that most people reported stable and even increased productivity after starting working from home.

The research, done by the Great Place To Work Institute, compared employee productivity from March to August 2020—the first six months of stay-at-home orders—with productivity from March to August 2019.

“With daily commutes and lengthy in-person meetings eliminated, employees likely found they were able to get more done. However, the biggest impact on remote work productivity came from the same factors that influence in-person productivity: company culture and leadership,” the institute said in a February 2021 post.

A study (pdf) from the U.K. done between April-June 2020 found that while 28.9 percent of the survey respondents got more done while working from home, 30.2 percent said their productivity had declined.

Worker Shortages, Pay Cuts

The prevalence of remote working could lead to worker shortages in some sectors. According to a report by the National Foundation for Educational Research, teacher shortages in England worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic partly due to the fact that the profession offered relatively limited opportunities to work from home.

The number of teacher vacancies posted by schools was found to be 93 percent higher in the academic year up to February 2023 when compared to the same period in the year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The continued high prevalence of home-working in many jobs in the wake of the pandemic indicates that it is a particularly attractive arrangement. The lack of availability of home-working may therefore represent a threat to the relative attractiveness of teaching,” the report said.

For some people, work-from-home arrangements are so attractive that they are willing to take a pay cut for it. An August 2022 study by a team of international economists and other experts found that American workers were willing to take a pay cut of 5.7 percent in exchange for remote work options.