Elon Musk, the world’s second-richest man, believes that remote work “is bullshit”.
“You’re gonna work from home and you’re gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory?” asked Elon during an interview with CNBC’s David Faber. “You’re gonna make people who make your food that gets delivered – they can’t work from home? The people that come fix your house? They can’t work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up.”
For a man who’s amassed one of the largest fortunes in history, Elon sounds positively egalitarian in his attitude towards shared sacrifice. His remarks seem like they might have been lifted from a high school football coach’s halftime pep talk. When I was in the Army, this was the kind of rah-rah boosterism that we officers would use as a last resort when asking a platoon to stay up until midnight while three mechanics pulled maintenance on a broken Humvee.
We’re all in this together, we’d remind our soldiers. If we’ve got three guys fixing an engine we’re all here until the job is done.
After I left the Army I transitioned into the corporate world, a world populated with what I like to think of as “inside jobs”. Jobs where you’re more likely to strain your eyesight than your ACL. Jobs where you might get slightly wet running from your parking spot into the office building, but will probably dry off before the 9:30 staff meeting. Jobs where a co-worker reminds you to embrace the suck when you have to work through lunch.
Jobs staffed by what Musk refers to as the “laptop classes living in la-la-land.”
The laptop class is real. There are many, many people that work in what Twitter and TikTok commenters deride as “bullshit email jobs”. The bullshit email job can’t always be defined but you know one when you see it. These jobs demand minimal engagement, are mediated by a screen, and usually revolve around manipulating electronic files.
Bullshit email jobs tend to proliferate in big organizations with nebulous reporting lines and hazy measures of productivity. Success in these jobs is measured simply as keeping it, pulling down that paycheck for another week of working for The Man.
A more militant view is that any professional-managerial-class type employment qualifies as a bullshit email job. College professors. Lawyers. Product Managers. Investment bankers. Systems architects. Computer engineers.
The deliverables in these jobs may be more sharply defined, the job titles more prestigious, the pay scale more rewarding…but at the end of the working day, they’re all shutting the laptop screen and logging off from their la-la-land of ones and zeros.
What’s remarkable about Elon’s view on working from home is the distinction he draws between the laptop class and anyone whose job requires manipulating physical objects instead of electronic files, and framing this divide in terms of moral obligation. What does the laptop class owe labor? According to Elon, the only moral choice that a knowledge worker can make is to work from…you guessed it, an office.
Only by working in an office, Elon might argue, can the laptop class assuage their collective guilt from working a bullshit email job and show solidarity with the everyday Joes and Janes that actually get shit done. The people cooking our food, building our houses, clearing our trash, and manning our factories. You know, the real workers.
The fact is, having workers perform their tasks in an office is close to an existential need for most corporate executives. Without an office to gather in, the daily life of a business organization is transformed. Executives don’t know what to manage. Middle managers struggle to define their fiefdoms. The bullshit email jobs are revealed (or not) and the workers still get paid…for sitting at home!
As much as Elon wants to fan the flames of resentment, there’s no real struggle between the laptop class versus physical labor. At least, no struggle that hasn’t existed since capitalism began. The real struggle, as it’s always been, is between those who own and those who work.
Praising the morality of office work seems like a misdirect, a slick rhetorical slight-of-hand from a man whose working life has consisted of one experience after the next of being the guy in charge.
Elon owns the office. His experience of coming to work - pursuing his own autonomously set goals on a schedule of his choosing - is profoundly different from that of the engineers and the product managers and, yes, the maintenance personnel and the landscapers and the cooks, that collectively keep the place running.
Don’t be fooled by an imaginary divide between the la-la-land of electronic work (whether performed in an office or elsewhere) and those who work in the real world. Instead, consider who wants you to come “back to work” and how much of the office building they own.