Tesla, which had more than 99,000 employees at the end of last year, has moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Palo Alto, California, although it still has a significant manufacturing and operating presence in California. SpaceX employs about 12,000 people, Musk said in a recent interview.
Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, said Mr. Musk to SpaceX and Tesla employees were among the strictest technology companies. Many tech companies have considered hybrid models in which employees can work from home for part of the time, he said.
Mr. Bloom said he expected SpaceX and Tesla to lose between 10 percent and 20 percent of their current workforce and that recruiters would try to catch employees by offering jobs with more flexible job options.
Many Tesla and SpaceX employees working in cutting-edge technology can believe in Mr. Musk, but there are also people “who do more common activities such as IT, finance, human resources and payroll,” said Mr. Bloom. “They can say, ‘I’m not designing cars. I’m making the payroll of the employees, and I can do it elsewhere ‘”.
Annie Dean, the head of distributed work for Atlassian, an Australian software company, described Mr. Musk of “obsolete”.
“This mindset is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative and digital work first,” said Ms. Dean, who was a former remote work manager at Meta, the owner of Facebook, in an email.
Mr. Musk has long been known as a demanding boss. At times, he tried to set an example for hard work, meeting late into the night, sending emails all the time, and even sleeping in the Tesla factory to help increase production in 2018.