Ex-Employee Defends Elon Musk: 12-Hour Days, Midnight Meetings, Power Naps at 2 AM
An ex-X employee says Elon Musk worked 12-hour days, held 1 AM meetings, and slept in the office.
A former senior X employee has pushed back hard against accusations that Elon Musk lacks work ethic, revealing that the billionaire regularly held product meetings at 1 a.m. and survived on two-hour power naps in the office while juggling Tesla, SpaceX, and X. Chris Bakke, founder of the job-search startup Laskie (Twitter’s first post-acquisition buyout in May 2023), spent over two years reporting directly to Musk and described a schedule that left little room for downtime.
In a viral X thread on November 19, Bakke responded to U.S. Representative Teresa Leger Fernández’s claim that “any schoolteacher has more work ethic in their pinky finger than Elon Musk has in his entire body,” writing, “When I reported to Elon, we would have X product meetings at 5 or 6 pm (because he was with the Tesla team for 10 hours before that), then my 1:1 check-in would be at 10 pm, but that would regularly get moved to 11 pm or midnight or 1 am.” He added that Musk would typically crash for a two-hour nap around 2 a.m. on office couches before restarting the cycle the next day—seven days a week, across multiple companies.
Bakke’s account aligns with Musk’s own public statements. The 54-year-old has repeatedly said he targets six hours of sleep—“less than that and I get brain pain”—and has been photographed sleeping on factory floors during Tesla production pushes. Recent reports from his 2025 stint inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building as head of DOGE even showed him bedding down on the floor beside his desk.
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The defence quickly racked up over 8 million views, with users split between praising Musk’s superhuman grind (“Man’s running three $100B+ companies on catnaps”) and questioning the sustainability of such a lifestyle for employees. Several ex-Twitter engineers chimed in to corroborate the midnight-to-dawn culture, while others pointed out that Musk’s intensity often translated into abrupt layoffs and 80–100-hour weeks for staff.
As Musk continues to shuttle between Tesla’s Austin headquarters, SpaceX’s Starbase, and occasional Washington trips, the testimony from one of his former direct reports has reignited the perennial debate: whether his famously brutal schedule is the key to his output—or simply impossible for anyone else to match.
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