It's most definitely about money, all the way.
The "executive class" stand to lose a lot more than the "laptop class" if staff don't return to the office.
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.
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.
Do you have stats? Or do you even have one good and compelling example?