It's most definitely about money, all the way.
Do you have stats? Or do you even have one good and compelling example?
The "executive class" stand to lose a lot more than the "laptop class" if staff don't return to the office.
Musk has be expressing concern even though it reduces emissions, nominally his primary goal, far more than electric commuting, and he himself heads so many companies that he mostly works remotely at all of them.
He says some contrived argument like that because people who deliver food and work in factories can't work at home, it isn't fair for office workers to so they should suffer as penance to balance out the karma scales. It's like saying if you eat Alaskan crab legs, your little league baseball coach job should be done on a boat in the Bering sea.
He tied the company into a 3 year lease and then sold our company to a multi-national company. Not the company that owned the office just the company using it nice extra little earner for him considering he also set the rent amount as well.
Companies like Meta were all gung ho about remote work in 2021, when they hadn't seen the long term impact of it. The push inside Meta for WFH not being as effective for new employees started coming up in 2023 after the performance evaluations were done and they noticed a trend. You might argue that the data analysis might have been incorrect, but that's another question. The same company is also heavily cutting on office space.
I know people in tech are pro remote but let us not come up with these wild unsubstantiated theories to support what we like.
Remote work might not be as effective for every company on the same level, maybe it is the culture, maybe it is role dependent, but it is simplistically not just about some shadowy real estate moguls.
WFH is a loss of control. For some leaders, being a "boss" is more important than what's good for the business.
WFH also requires the right culture. I've seen it abused when I worked at Intel, and when Yahoo cracked down on it, the abuses were similar.
I should point out that I've predominately WFH for almost a decade; but it works because I'm trustworthy and I work for people who are managers instead of "bosses." In an environment where the workers aren't trustworthy, or the management structure is more about being a "boss," it won't work.
Plus if remote work really takes off, there's no need to crowd all those people into the downtown cores of a few cities anyway. It'd shift housing demand to cheaper, more naturally desirable locations.
What'll happen is that a few firms with ineffective cost structures will go bankrupt, a few major cities will become hollowed-out wastelands the way NYC was in the 1970s or Boston was in the 1950s, and economic growth will pick up in other areas, with new startups and new desirable hubs.
Except in SF or NYC, there aren't that many desirable "different locations" left. Which is why freeing up the poorly used space in city centers can be a net positive for society rather than keeping to maintain these white elephants.
Have you heard of sunk cost fallacy?
I'm perplexed by postings like this, HN should be rejoicing in these right-sizings and the maximization of opportunities for those no longer bound to such inefficiencies.