Elon Musk Flaunts Laws, Building Codes to Push Hustle Culture

I’m glad my agency cares more about me than Musk does about his employees.

Well, tech bro and general garbage person Elon Musk is in the news for his Twitter antics again. This time, he converted part of the Twitter building into makeshift hotel rooms for employees to sleep in during their “hardcore” work sessions. Those rooms subsequently got reported for a variety of code violations.

When this was first reported, Musk naturally turned to whataboutism, suggesting that the city should focus on things like making sure that kids are safe from fentanyl. This conveniently ignores two things: first, drug prevention programs and building codes are completely different city departments, and second, it is possible to care about more than one thing at a time.

In case you missed the impetus for this, Musk asked Twitter employees to work twice as hard and twice as much to cover the workload of the employees that he laid off. Naturally, a bunch more walked out, so now the skeleton crew that’s left is putting in the aforementioned “hardcore” effort to cover the gaps. And, to “support” their efforts, Musk built these “hotel rooms” for them.

Of course, nothing says “good mental health” like literally spending the entire week at work, eating, showering, and sleeping there 24/7. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former crypto billionaire tech bro, apparently once tweeted “If I sleep in the office, my mind stays in work mode and I don’t have to reload everything the next day.” Because that’s totally a healthy attitude to take about work.

Hustle culture is not a strictly American thing but was popularized here by the tech boom and assorted tech bros like Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others. The job “perks” like gyms, cafeterias, happy hours, and arcades are designed to keep employees at the office as much as possible so they don’t mind working 12-hour days coding.

All the while, these employees are killing both their backs and their mental health under the guise of “moving fast and breaking things,” the former motto of Facebook and the unofficial mantra of pretty much all of Silicon Valley. Musk himself once tweeted that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” and that hot garbage has powered a bunch of underappreciated coders in California and elsewhere for decades.

Now, as we approach 2023, people aren’t going to stand for that anymore. Most of us have families and hobbies and things outside of work that we want to pursue, and while 60 and 80-hour work weeks are good for some, they’re not great for most of us. All we want is to be able to put in our 40 hours and then go back to our actual homes to eat food we like, spend time with our loved ones, and sleep in our own beds. There is literally nothing wrong with that.

Americans have become disillusioned with the American hustle culture, and we’re not buying the success porn of the hustlers who made their millions with hard work, determination, and a small investment of $5,000,000 of daddy’s money. We are becoming incredibly aware that the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses and Musks of the world don’t want to help us become rich, they just want to become richer on our labor, and we’re not going to take that crap anymore.

We are starting to understand that perks like arcades, on-site food trucks, bar carts, gyms, and bean bag chairs are all just a ploy to get us to stay at work as long as possible. After all, the longer we grind, the more dollars we put into our CEO’s pockets. Employees that stay at work stay in the work mindset, so if you can keep your employees at work longer with simple conveniences, you’ll get more bang for your buck out of them.

Work from home has killed a lot of that and CEOs know it. We are all aware now that many of our office jobs can be done at home in our PJs with no travel time, and since there’s no reason to be in the office for 12 of our precious waking hours each day, why should we ever go back?

Of course, there is a lot of money invested in the infrastructure around keeping us chained to our desks — if nobody is using those gyms and cafeterias, they’re just a huge waste of space. What’s the point of keeping up with those big investments designed to keep your workers in the work mindset if your workers aren’t using them?

On top of that, a lot of companies are located in areas that depend on business traffic during the lunch hour — restaurants and convenience stores that rely on hungry coders and business folks to pay their bills during the week. As with many businesses of that type, it’s the owners who get rich off the backs of their workers — the fast food joints and quick service restaurants depend on low-wage workers to feed all those mid-wage office monkeys.

It is crucial for many, many people’s bottom lines that we spend time working at our desks in the office instead of at home. Lots of money is invested in businesses, amenities, and infrastructure that caters to desk jockeys, so if they stop spending their money on lunches and gas and start saving it instead, all the owners, executives, and shareholders lose out.

The Elon Musks of the world will shove the responsibility onto others, of course — they didn’t get ahead by taking even the slightest bit of responsibility for their failings. Obviously, workers who don’t want to spend 24/7 at work and put in 80+ hours a week aren’t really dedicated to the company. Obviously, anyone who thinks this is a bad idea is just a loser who won’t make anything of themselves.

It’s not like Twitter employees have lives or families, or even their own mental health to take care of. Clearly, they should be 100% invested in the company, and if they’re not, then they can hit the road. None of Twitter’s woes right now are the fault of bad management on Musk’s part — it’s all the haters and lazy employees who want to do terrible things like work from home and have good mental health.

Oh, and of course the city who would even dare consider looking into building code violations at a company owned by Elon friggin’ Musk, as though said violations aren’t potentially dangerous and life-threatening. Who cares about stupid building codes, anyway? It’s not like they’re written in blood or something.

Look, I could dunk on Elon Musk for quite a while, and if you want to see me do just that, check this one out:

However, the whole point of all of this is that Musk (and other billionaires and CEOs and whatnot) have the wrong idea when they try to drag people back to the office full-time. Yes, they need to make all of those amenities that they offer worth their cost and space investments, and they need to put money in the pockets of other assorted businesses in the area, but they’re rapidly alienating their workforce by doing so.

We are starting to understand that the meager perks that we have been offered — the ping-pong tables and company-subsidized food courts — are all just curtains that cover the man pulling our levers. Workers don’t need to think of work as a second home with all of those amenities when many of us can reasonably do our jobs from our literal homes. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, even when the company provides it to you as a “job perk.”

Do you know what workers could actually use? Let’s start with the stuff that my employer did for us this year. First off, they negotiated lower health insurance costs for everyone. Ignoring that I feel that healthcare should be a single-payer affair, lower health insurance costs are a fantastic help for me and many like me.

Do you know what else they’ve given us? More time off. Everyone gets a personal day to use whenever they want on top of our existing PTO and holiday structure (which is already pretty generous). Additionally, because we work in a mental health field where many of our employees deal directly with clients, those employees get paid time off if something catastrophic happens to a client, like suicide. That kind of stuff is traumatic to clinicians and crisis workers who interact with the clients, and we encourage them to use their time off when that happens.

Heck, my agency encourages people to use their time off regardless. I have never been given trouble for using all of my PTO every year, and the company culture is one of “take care of yourself first,” so using PTO is an important part of ensuring that we are healthy enough to actually do our jobs. Basically, part of my job is taking care of my own mental health, and as such, I am encouraged to use our benefits.

Speaking of health, we also push our other wellness benefits, such as our Employee Assistance Plan (EAP), which is pretty robust. My workplace has also implemented a wellness stipend that we can use for a broad range of health-related things to care for ourselves.

Finally, there is a culture of working from home as a form of self-care. Our CEO is a big fan of people being able to work from home as much as what suits them. While I’ve taken to coming into the office once or twice a week, there is no solid pressure to do so if a given workweek doesn’t accommodate it. Basically, if your job accommodates working from home, you are more than welcome to do so as much as your position will allow.

When I think of things that I want out of my job, these make up a big chunk of my list. Fewer expenses, whether health insurance, gas, or lunch costs, and more perks, like time off and work-from-home opportunities, are what make me and many workers happy. I work to support my lifestyle — I do not live to work and my job is neither my whole identity nor my entire purpose in life. As such, the ability to take time off and work from home is what matters to me.

As far as I’m concerned, people like Elon Musk can take their gyms, cafeterias, and hotel rooms and shove them places that aren’t fit to print. My mental health is more important to me than your stupid bird app, or any job, really, so if you’re expecting me to go “hardcore” and work 80 hours a week, you can take a hike. The fact that a bunch of Twitter employees did just that makes me incredibly happy.

Am I thrilled that Elon Musk is likely going to kill Twitter? Hell no. However, if somewhere along the way the world realizes (a) what a ponce he is and (b) that his style of work is outdated and stupid, I’ll be at least a little happy with those outcomes. Hopefully, he won’t completely burn down Twitter in the process.

In the meantime, I hope you all continue to care for your mental health. There are basically no jobs that are worth sacrificing your well-being, mental, physical, or otherwise, so stop letting people like Elon Musk tell you as much.

Be well out there.

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