SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As Tesla CEO and Twitter mogul Elon Musk tells it, I may be unproductive — despite the multiple articles and extensive work I produce each week — and immoral. That’s because, for the last decade, I’ve mostly.As Tesla CEO and Twitter mogul Elon Musk tells it, I may be unproductive — despite the multiple articles I produce each week — and immoral.
As Tesla CEO and Twitter mogul Elon Musk tells it, I may be unproductive — despite the multiple articles and extensive work I produce each week — and immoral. That’s because, for the last decade, I’ve mostly worked from my second bedroom here in Northern California. My main coworker is an orange tabby named Marigold, who rarely interrupts my focus except when she insists on a belly rub.
In an interview with CNBC’s David Faber last week, Musk told the nation’s “laptop class” to get off “their moral high horse with the work-from-home bulls***.” As news reports note, many tech workers are upset about Bay Area companies suddenly requiring people to head back to their cubicles now that pandemic work-from-home orders are gone. He says remote workers are living in “la-la land.” That might be true, but his broader point isn’t. ( Will California Outsmart AI?)
“So people were building cars, servicing the cars, building houses, fixing houses, making the food making all the things that people consume,” he added. “It’s messed up to assume that yes they have to go to work but you don’t.… It’s not just a productivity thing. I think it’s morally wrong.”
I understand the appeal of slamming high-earning laptop junkies when the average American is stuck working in a store, restaurant, cubicle, on a farm, or in a factory — and usually earning much less money in the process. But there’s nothing immoral about working from home.
Not many people do exactly what they want to do for their work, and almost no one is paid what they think they deserve, but there’s never been a time — and rarely been a place in the history of the world — where so many people can earn a decent living in so many different ways. Certainly, the pandemic provided an unexpected shakeup of the work world.
