Elon Musk tells Tesla employees to return to office or resign

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is demanding workers return to the office full-time or leave the company.

In an email, Musk said everyone at the company "must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla," Electrek reported. He wrote in the subject line that remote work "is no longer" acceptable, and he said he'll approve any exceptions himself.

In a second email, Musk reportedly clarified employees may not work in "some remote pseudo office" and that "if you don't show up, we will assume you have resigned." The demand was also made to workers at his rocket company, SpaceX, The New York Times reports. Musk has recently praised Tesla workers in Shanghai, who according to Bloomberg have been "effectively locked in for months, working 12-hour shifts, six days a week."

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Musk's stance against remote work quickly generated pushback online, and one Twitter user asked him to respond to "people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept," to which Musk wrote back, "They should pretend to work somewhere else."

Economics journalist Patrick W. Watson, though argued Musk's demand "probably won't have the desired effect and may produce its opposite," while economic and financial historian Natacha Postel-Vinay told Insider "most of the evidence shows that productivity has increased while people stayed at home."