Elon Musk, CEO of TSLA-Q at Tesla Inc., has asked employees to return to the office or leave the company, according to an email sent to employees Tuesday night and seen by Reuters.
“Everyone at Tesla has to spend at least 40 hours in the office a week,” Musk said in an email.
“If you do not show up, we will assume that you have resigned.”
Two sources confirmed the authenticity of the email reviewed by Reuters. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Silicon Valley’s leading technology companies do not require workers to return to the office full-time, given the resistance of some workers and the resurgence of coronavirus cases.
Tesla has moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, but has one of its factories and its engineering base in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Sure, there are companies that don’t require it, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It’s been a while,” Musk said in the email.
“Tesla has created and will manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. That won’t happen by calling it quits.”
One of Musk’s Twitter followers posted another email that Musk apparently sent to executives asking them to work in the office for at least 40 hours a week or “Tesla brown.”
In response to this tweet, the billionaire, who has accepted the deprivation of Twitter Inc. in a $ 44 billion deal, said, “They should pretend to work elsewhere.”
In May 2020, Musk reopened a Tesla factory in Fremont, California, challenging Alameda County blockade measures to curb the spread of coronavirus. Tesla reported 440 cases at the factory from May to December 2020, according to county data obtained by the legal information site Plainsite.
Last year, Musk’s rocket company SpaceX reported 132 cases of COVID-19 at its headquarters in Hawthorne, Los Angeles, according to county data.
While some great employers have adopted home-based volunteering policies on a permanent basis, others, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are betting that it’s best to encourage face-to-face interactions between peers.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted in March that Twitter offices would reopen, but employees could still work from home if they preferred.