Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to share that he is back to clocking in more hours at work and sleeping at the office. He, however, added that this intense work routine comes with a caveat – only if his little one allows it. Musk also shared an old interview clip in which he admitted that working longer hours had a negative impact on both his brain and heart. And longer working hours here literally mean far more than what Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy had suggested.
“Back to working 7 days a week and sleeping in the office if my little kids are away,” Musk wrote on Twitter, the social media platform he owns and rebranded as X.
Alongside, he shared a 2018 interview with Leslie Stahl on Sunday’s “60 Minutes” on CBS, where he advised people against working longer hours, as such a lifestyle is damaging to one’s health.
‘No one should work for this many hours’
The video opens to show an interviewer asking him: “22 hours a day. I wonder how many hours a week?”
“I mean, seven days a week, sleeping in the factory. I worked in the paint shop, assembly line, and body shop,” Musk responded.
When asked whether he ever worried about his own well-being, he responded, “No one should put this many hours into work. This is not good. People should not work this hard.”
“They should not do this. This is very very painful,” he reiterated, before adding, “It hurts my brain, my heart.”
Back to working 7 days a week and sleeping in the office if my little kids are away https://t.co/77cc6sRCFZ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2025
Musk on 120 hours a week
At the time, Musk explained that he didn’t want his team to feel like he was assigning tasks or suggesting something he wouldn’t take on himself. To prove this, he once said he ‘hadn’t left the factory’ and had ‘slept on the floor,’ adding that he would move himself to wherever the biggest problem at Tesla was.
“I don’t believe that people should be experiencing hardship while the CEO is off on vacation… I really believe that one should lead from the front lines, and that’s why I am here,” he told “CBS This Morning” host Gayle King in 2018.
Tesla factory was his primary residence for 3 years
Musk also revealed that for nearly three years, he made Tesla factories his “primary residence”, adding that sleeping on the floor was “uncomfortable” and that it made him “smell like dust”.
“I slept on the couch at one point, in a tent on the roof, and for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory… It was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor, and always, when I woke up, I’d smell like metal dust,” he had said in 2018.