Eric Siu examines whether Elon Musk's grueling work culture should be a model for other companies. A SpaceX engineer quit after maternity leave because she couldn't sustain 70-100 hour weeks. High-intensity cultures work for some, but they're not sustainable or right for everyone.
If Elon is willing to sleep in the office and work as hard as he is, his message is other people should. You have to set the example as a leader. And let me give you something. So I'll just say one of my friends recently was hanging out with a SpaceX party with a bunch of SpaceX engineers. Okay. One of the engineers just had a baby recently. Okay. So she was on maternity leave. She came back and then she quit. She promptly quit. Why do you think she quit? Because she didn't want to work the hours. She can't take it anymore, right? It's like she thought she could come back and work the 70, 80, 90, 100 hours plus, but she couldn't. And the thing with, with Elon is he has extremely high standards, but it's very hard to sustain that, especially when it's not your own own business too. But at a certain point, there's gonna be a breaking point. But I thought that was just interesting. Like, this is a whole— like, SpaceX is great mission and everything, but it's not for everyone all the time. And so I have a buddy who worked at SpaceX, and I said, why'd you make the move? And he said, the hours were too much for me trying to raise a family. So I picked Boeing because I could get paid well and work-life balance. Work-life balance. Yeah, work-life balance is a thing.
