Don't Work 80 Hours a Week for Elon Musk, or Anyone

If you're going to work 80 hours a week, at least work for yourself, while doing something where you are free and where you can use your passion to fuel the extra work. Work in something that is fun for you, that will make you grow, that will help you to learn new things and hopefully it will allow you to build equity for yourself.

Working 80 hours for someone else while sacrificing freedom, mental health, family time, leisure time and self-development time (although someone could argure that you will grow at that job) is simply financial stupidity. The return over investment through the lens of your needs hierarchy will yield incredibly low results.

Life is short. Your impact at a company like Tesla is going to be nominal regardless of how many hours you put into work. There are some exceptions to that, but that would be the case for most. If you are going to drink that kool-aid of "here we work long and hard because we are changing the world", at least be ready to face the realization that this might not be true. It will definitely not be true at the scale of your micro-universe where more significant things like relationships and health will be affected.

If it's an early startup, there's a chance that you can have exponential impact by putting more hours into work, but still, 80 hours is not gonna accomplish anything for anyone, especially in this BS tech culture where people work hard for the optics and rarely because doing it can lead to concrete and actionable decisions and progress.

If you're going to work 80 hours for someone else, don't tell anyone that you're working 80 hours. Don't use it as a badge of honor. Don't try to capitalize on your suffering. It makes you look stupid.

Was at LEGO many years ago. I remember that a couple of guys in the same department started to clock in overtime. A few days later a manager come by the department and ask everyone to stop working. He wanted to find the root cause for why people was working overtime, because according to LEGO management, overtime is a sign of a process that does not work and that there is something wrong in that department.

I never understood this almost deity like admiration that people have for individuals like elon musk or Jeff bezos (amongst others). They are massive jerks who have built amazing fortunes at the expense of their employees. Why are we admiring that? How is that a laudable goal in life?

I'm an independent consultant, and I have slightly more nuanced version of this. First: all of us, Musk included, work for someone. In Musk's case, he is working for his shareholders. There are two distinct, but correlated values you need to consider with work. First, is the value that your work creates for other people. This is captured by the price you charge for that work. The work could be direct labor (as in being an employee,) or it could be the labor that goes into a product sold to a customer (this would make you an entrepreneur.) The second is the part of that value you are able to capture for yourself. The higher the proportion, the greater your benefit. But remember you really care about the absolute compensation you get, not the proportion of the value create. You can be a small cog in the machine at Tesla and make $500K a year or you can be an entrepreneur and capture 40% of your revenue as after tax profit for yourself and make $150K. There is surely some hedonic value in being independent, so depending on how much you value your freedom, that $150k might well be worth $300K to you. In which case, you would be indifferent to either working for Musk or for yourself. Of course a proper calculation, would take into account growth prospects at both Tesla and your own business. I made this calculation before leaving Microsoft, and preferred to take my chances as independent consultant even though the initial income was less than a 10th of what I made at Microsoft. But eventually my income turned out to be 3x greater than I would have earned at MSFT over the same period, so the trade-off was a good one. But remember, this only because I was a low levels employee at Microsoft. My prospects at Microsoft were not good enough to get me to a CVP position or better in any reasonable timeframe. For a person with a realistic prospect of making VP or better at a FAANG, the calculation is considerably more in favour of remaining an employee. In both situations it makes sense to work as hard as possible to maximise the likelihood of a positive outcome for you. So work as hard as you can in the direction that is most likely to give you the greatest benefit.

I interviewed at SpaceX a few years back and can roundly confirm that everybody I interviewed with, barring a VP, had what I'd call "the fear" in their eyes - I ended up not getting an offer based on my lackluster college GPA (this as a 10+ year experienced senior engineer), but it was concerning enough I'd have likely not taken it had one been extended.

I appreciate what he's doing but the means are questionable - chew up folks for a few years until they're too burnt out to go on, then recruit fresh grads on name and the chance to be a part of something amazing.

> Stanford economist John Pencanvel reviewed World War I-era factory data and more recent literature to conclude that exceeding 50 hours in a week leads to diminishing returns

Applicability questionable.

> exceeding 50 hours in a week ... may actually reduce output

> But Musk is smart. He’s not talking about that kind of efficiency. He’s talking about m[in]imizing what he, the man with $24 billion, spends on his own workforce.... [so he'll] try to draw extra work out of you

Extra work doesn't make him richer if it results in reduced output. The arguments here are in internal tension.

I’m not sure using WWI era factory data is the best way to support the point, but I agree generally. For me, decision making ability is vastly reduced if I’m tired or burned out.

Nothing could be truer. You end up harming your mental and physical health for someone else's benefit. Musk does it but ultimately he is doing it for himself, no matter what he says.

Work 80 hours a week, make sure they pay you at least $250-300k for it. Retire after 10 years.

You should have your eyes wide open about the ROI from any job. IMO working long hours for a big payoff can be worth it, a lot of fortunes and great things have been done with this method.

I think more people need to realize that the buzz / bullshit around "startups" in this day and age is used significantly to trick naive noobies / NCG's into working insane hours with sub-par pay and sometimes no benefits.

All under the guise of "changing the world" or "disrupting". IMO, people who take time to think about things and implement solutions at a reasonable pace are just as productive if not more productive than people who feel like they always have to be "pushing".

Zerosumism