Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down for a sprawling interview with CNBC anchor David Faber on Tuesday following Tesla’s 2023 annual shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, CNBC reported.
During the course of their approximately hour long conversation, Musk reflected on:
How he has managed a takeover of Twitter so far and what lies ahead. Among other things, he said Twitter’s Community Notes feature has cost Twitter $40 million in business when two big clients reduced spending after their ads received community notes accusing them of false advertising. He also claimed that when the acquisition closed, Twitter had negative $3 billion in annual cash flow and $1 billion in the bank.
He also defended his own tweets that were widely criticized as lending credence to conspiracies about George Soros and a recent mass shooting event in Allen, Texas, insisting “I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
His political views, including his belief that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and it wasn’t stolen, but that he thinks there was at least some voting fraud. He also said he voted for Biden but hinted that he wasn’t happy with his choice, saying “I wish we could have just a normal human being as president.”
His personal views and habits when it comes to work and productivity: He said he takes only two or three days off per year, works seven days a week and gets six hours of sleep a night. He also said he believes it’s morally wrong for people in the “laptop class” to advocate for working form home when service workers, such as people who work in factories, still have to show up in person.
CNBC also posted an article titled: “Elon Musk: Working from home is ‘morally wrong’ when service workers still have to show up” From the article:
Silicon Valley “laptop classes” need to get off their “moral high horse” with their “work-from-home bull***, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told CNBC’s David Faber in a Tuesday interview.
Musk was discussing return-to-office imperatives that have caused significant concern among tech workers in Silicon Valley and across the U.S., many of who were promised generous remote work mandates by top executives.
“I think that the whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘Let them eat cake’,” Musk said. “It’s not just a productive thing,” Musk said, “I think it’s morally wrong.”
Musk referred to tech workers as the “laptop classes living in la-la-land,” telling Faber it was hypocritical to work from home while expecting service workers to continue to show up in person.
Twitter’s headquarters in the United States is located in San Francisco, California. The California Civil Rights Department clearly states: “Disability discrimination occurs when an employer treats a qualified employee or applicant unfavorably because she has a disability. The law also requires an employer to provide reasonable accommodation to an employee or job applicant with a disability, unless doing so would cause significant difficulty or expense for the employer.”
It seems to me that reasonable accommodation for workers with disabilities should include the option to work from home. As a person who has disabilities, I find Elon Musk’s comments about employees who want to work from home to be disgusting and degrading.