June 1 – Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) chief executive Elon Musk has urged employees to return to the office or leave the company, according to an email sent to employees Tuesday night and was viewed by Reuters.
“Everyone at Tesla has to be in the office at least 40 hours a week,” Musk said in the email.
“If you don’t show up, we’ll assume you’ve resigned.”
Two sources confirmed the authenticity of the email verified by Reuters. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Big tech companies in Silicon Valley are not requiring workers to return to the office full-time amid opposition from some workers and a resurgence of coronavirus cases.
Tesla has moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, but has one of its factories and engineering base in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Of course there are companies that don’t require this, but when was the last time you shipped a great new product? It’s been a while,” Musk said in the email.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the groundbreaking ceremony of Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory in Shanghai, China, 7 January 2019. REUTERS/Aly Song
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“Tesla has and will continue to design and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on earth. This will not come through a phone call.”
One of Musk’s Twitter followers posted another email Musk apparently sent to executives, urging them to work at least 40 hours a week in the office or “leave Tesla.”
In response to that tweet, the billionaire, who has agreed to take Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) private in a $44 billion deal, said, “They should pretend they work elsewhere.”
In May 2020, Musk opened a Tesla factory in Fremont, California, defying Alameda County’s lockdown measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Tesla has reported 440 cases at the factory from May to December 2020, according to county data obtained by legal information site Plainsite.
Last year, Musk’s rocket company SpaceX reported 132 COVID-19 cases at its headquarters in the Los Angeles-area city of Hawthorne, according to the county.
While some large employers have made voluntary work-from-home policies permanent, others, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google (GOOGL.O), are betting that it’s best to encourage face-to-face interactions between colleagues.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tweeted in March that Twitter offices would reopen but employees could continue to work from home if they wished.
Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco and Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru and ; Edited by Anil D’Silva, Howard Goller and Jonathan Oatis
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