It's all about incentives. Elon doesn't have to worry about money, so all of his projects are based on personal desire, ego, or both. I think the dude is amazing, but like anyone else, he has his issues...Pedo Guy, Elongate, Twitter spats, plus has 8 kids, yet supposedly works 80 to 90 hour weeks. Life is all about family...when he's on his deathbed someday, his company will replace him in a heartbeat, but his family can't! Plus in terms of incentives, what's in it for Tesla employees other than a hefty paycheck if you're in upper management?
They're not making billions,
they aren't as invested as he is in his dreams...most of them just want to get by & do well & have a nice job.
Treating people right isn't rocket science. I toured my friend's facility a few years ago...he runs it like family. 60+ people, no one scatters when he walks in the room, on a first-name basis with everyone, great work environment, pays well, has free snacks everywhere, just generally takes care of his people! People are accountable because they WANT to contribute to their team & use their talents to contribute to their products & services, not because they live under the gun! Exactly
zero people every want to leave working for him because he's created the greatest working environment ever!
I do freelance IT & get to see the inner workings of an awful lot of companies, from manufacturing to food service. The culture that management creates is what makes or breaks the working environment. Oddly enough, plenty of companies still make huge profits despite awful working conditions (re: Amazon Warehouses in the news), because once they figure out what works & get setup for it, they can reduce the product quality & hire unskilled labor for cheap & the machine keeps rolling (look at just about any fast food franchise out there! Plus places like Walmart), so corporate success doesn't really correlate to inner culture at those companies, because once the products & services are in motion, as long as they stay relevant & keep putting out whatever it is they do, the money keeps rolling in!
Bottom line is that we could do better. Elon knows that he has the golden handcuffs around his executive team & can push these kinds of buttons without people jumping ship en masse because it's hard to give up a high-dollar lifestyle, even when it sucks up all your free time! I spent a solid decade working 70+ hour weeks, which is fine if you're like me & have ADHD & have a brain that won't turn off & need to be doing
something all the time, but not so great if you're
compelled to do so because your billionaire boss says so, haha! Which I think is
really odd of Elon, considering that Twitter (his apparent upcoming purchase) is currently a 100% work-from-home "forever" company:
In a Tweet, Parag Agrawal, the new CEO of Twitter, who took over from Jack Dorsey, announced that he’d continue the option of working remotely “forever,” as other tech companies are calling for workers to return to the office.
www.forbes.com
It'd be fun to see him do an "undercover boss" on the line in his factory for an extended period of time...not just a day or a week, but really get in there & work through the slog, get paid the average, try to live on that, etc. People get so disconnected from what regular human beings have to go through that weird stuff like the OP comes up. People should have regular working hours, a livable wage, free time to not just spend time with but also
enjoy their families, hobbies, pets, etc. When I was working a lot of hours, I was fortunate because I was getting a lot of fulfillment from work, but it left me pretty drained to the point where I couldn't even enjoy stuff like video games because I was in mental burnout mode all the time, which is no way to live! I hope someone close to him can give him some perspective about the true purpose of life, rather than just trying to bully people into the grind! He has the opportunity to make his company an unheard of place to work for
positive reasons rather than negative reasons!