Elon Musk rips remote work as ‘bulls–t’ and ‘morally wrong’ | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk rips remote work as ‘bulls–t’ and ‘morally wrong’

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12 pointsjarsin20 comments

This fella doesn’t even understand that different roles and line of works will have different characteristics, I can be an offshore oil drilling engineer who spends 6months on duty and 6months off, or a university instructor who spends few hours teaching a week while rest researching on my couch, some other person is doing their work flying while others most of their time are in the data centers, and the list goes on, some can do their jobs remotely and some can’t, that’s how work, works!

Sometimes I wonder how he’s even wealthy with such a low IQ indicators..

Elon is a brilliant promoter, hustler and salesman.

He profits off the work of hardworking people with high IQs and lots of expertise.

It is a fallacy to conflate the work of 1000s of skilled people at Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX, etc and assign the accomplishments to a single person. Elon is the guy with the whip on a long-boat rowed by scores of shackled slaves.

I think he's pandering to some audience that isn't overlapping a lot with hacker news. I don't know who it is. Probably it's some caricature of blue collar worker that exists only in his mind. His superfans will like it.

Or just mad at turnover and people choosing to quit rather than follow him.

I think you’re 100% right.

I encounter this a lot with really mission driven people. They are aghast and angry that you also will not drop everything/give thousands/work for nothing to support the mission.

you might be onto something

At the government department I work for in Australia, we had a new CEO come in at the end of COVID lockdowns and order all staff back into the office full time. The mandate lasted 2-3 weeks before it was retracted due to staff reaction.

I firmly believe that the CEO only issued the mandate as he was told to do so (almost everyone has a boss).

The department has now adopted flexible working arrangements beyond just working from home. As a result, the workforce is happier, all be it some parts of management are still slow to evolve.

Stories like this will keep happening until we evolve to the new ways of working. Just because we did something for 50+ years doesn't mean there aren't better ways of doing something. Mostly I just statements like this as people living in the past, refusing to adapt to a changing world.

> “It’s like, 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? You’re gonna make people who make your food that gets delivered – they can’t work from home? The people that come fix your house? They can’t work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up.”

I suppose next up it’s morally wrong that the people making your food make less money than you too.

How many of those factory workers is he planning on replacing with robots I wonder?

What about those that work in the office vs factory vs trade shows vs visiting client sites?

What about regional satellite offices that don’t really have an office?

Even before COVID it was never so black and white.

Yeah, and ‘un-American’, too.

Like Linux, as someone else said.

I can’t stand this dude.

3-2-1 before all the Elon stans come out and troll you. /sarcasm

I, too, can’t stand the guy. It seems he speaks without weighing the benefits and cons of things. It’s like pure id with no brains is speaking.

Which office does Elon work from anyway at any time? Tesla, Twitter, Space X or something else?

Working for Tesla remotely from the Twitter office is on the same level as working remote. When you sleep in the office that’s your home except for a different company!

If you are going to be all-in on forcing people into your office, maybe it might help your moral argument to pay the rent and hire some cleaners?

Was he high? If someone says “like” that much I automatically disregard everything they say. Either drugs or disorganized thinking.

I don't think that's a very fair reason to disregard what a person is saying.

I have other reasons for ignoring Musk, such as his history of lying, exaggeration, personal attacks on people, provoking people. If he wants to talk about work from home in moral terms I can consider his own moral shortcomings and how he has no moral authority.

But someone how says "like" repeatedly telegraphs confused thinking. Normally I hear that from teenagers, who have the excuse of youth.

> But someone how says "like" repeatedly telegraphs confused thinking. Normally I hear that from teenagers, who have the excuse of youth.

Or it telegraphs that they're constantly reevaluating the assumptions behind what they're saying in real-time, unlike charismatic salespeople or politicians who will never use the word "like" because they are spewing unthinking bullshit.

I have the same evaluation of Musk as you do but don't agree with the comment about "like" usage.

Put the productivity argument aside. Does Elon Musk have any moral authority to harangue other people? His comments lack any self-awareness, to say nothing of moral insight.

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