Elon Musk mandated in-office work during COVID because he understood that remote work slows down fast-paced engineering projects. The speaker argues leaders need physical proximity to communicate effectively and keep momentum on high-stakes technical work.
Communication gets things done faster, like especially if you're a leader in the company. And so that's where I think remote work fails. So I'm reading this book right now called Musk's Memos, and it's all emails that were made public. By Elon Musk? Yeah. And then he's basically like, yep, during COVID yep, we're gonna be in office, guys. We're not gonna do what other people are doing. Yep, if I need to sleep on the floor, I'm gonna do that. If I need— like, it's all about communication, guys. I'm gonna be working on the floor with you guys at the test line, like, like with the robots and everything. I know it's dangerous. I want to be there with you, and I want to prove to you that I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make this And you just see all the resilience that he's been through and all the pain. But this is one of those things where he knew intuitively that if they switched to remote, things would be a lot slower. And for the things that he's trying to do, you just can't do that.
