Tesla employees shares stories of seeing Elon Musk sleeping at work

Tesla CEO Elon
Musk
Noah Berger / AP
Photo

• Business Insider
   spoke
  to 42 current and recent Tesla
  employees about what it’s really like to
  work for one of the world’s most ambitious and controversial
  companies.
• Employees agreed that the company was demanding and the
  hours were often long.
• But, they said, no one works as long as CEO Elon Musk,
  who always seems to be there.
• We heard many stories of employees finding him curled
  up under desks or tables napping.
• Some people found this work ethic inspiring; others,
  not so much.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a reputation among his employees as the
super human guy who almost never sleeps.

As Tesla scrambles to meet the demand for its electric vehicles,
and attempts grow itself into a profitable big-league car company
instead of a cash-burning upstart, its factories are running
24/7, with employees working 8-12 hour shifts, morning and night,
they told us.

And they see their leader toiling right alongside them, from the
wee hours of the morning to late at night, showing up anywhere
and everywhere, at any time, they said.

Musk works until he has to crawl into a corner somewhere in
Tesla’s facility to catch a few winks, they told us. He
recently admitted that he was so exhausted from this past
year at Tesla that he sometimes uses the sleep aid Ambien.

Business Insider spoke to 42 employees about what it’s like to
work at the controversial company, and we heard story after story
of employees finding Musk asleep somewhere: on the factory floor,
under a desk, in a conference room.

Read more: 70-hour weeks and ‘WTF’
emails:

 42
employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the ‘cult’
of Elon Musk

For instance, Miguel Carrera, a manufacturing tech
lead, told us, “He’s here all the time. I know people
have seen him sleeping on the floor under a desk. All of a
sudden, everybody’s all walking out and you look around and
someone is curled up under the desk, come to find out it’s Elon.”

Jimmy Guajardo, a Tesla production associate in Fremont, says
there aren’t always clues that Musk has pulled up a patch of
floor to catch some z’s. But in the office section at the
company’s main factory in Fremont, California, he can sometimes
be found under a table near where a security guard is standing,
asleep with a pillow and blanket.

Employees can walk right by him unaware,  especially “if you
didn’t know what you’re looking for,” Guajardo said, adding
that Musk is never asleep on the floor for very long. 

Some people are not impressed with Musk’s sleep habits, seeing it
as an indication of a weakness: poor management.

For instance, a former VP who worked with him and admires
him for being a visionary, also complained that, “he
is terrible at management.”

“Because of his management techniques, the entire
management structure at Tesla is intricate and terrible,” this
former manager said. “Then something they are not
managing
 spirals out of control and becomes
this gigantic problem … so Elon fires some engineer that made
some irrelevant, bad decision and Elon sleeps on
the 
factory floor
until the problem is fixed, or whatever. Some symbolic thing. But
it doesn’t actually fix the root problem which is terrible
management.”

There’s been some research supporting the idea that working
long hours on a regular basis is often a form of poor management.

Still, the happiest Tesla employees are self-described
workaholics who say they love working long hours. 

Several employees, including Carrera, said they found
Musk’s work-till-you-drop work ethic “inspiring.” And that it
causes them to push themselves harder, too, to help their company
and stare down Tesla’s many naysayers.

Dexter Siga is a quality manager in Fremont who explained
it this way: “He’s not afraid to get dirty, not afraid to
work on the [production] line,” Siga says. “He sleeps over here.
For real. That man is dedicated to his craft. He’s dedicated to
his company. I was talking to one of his guys. They literally
sleep on the floor. They are under the tables, on the rug
sleeping. They don’t have airbeds. Why would you not want to work
for someone like that?”

Siga says Musk’s sleep-at-work practice shows employees that “he
cares so much” and that he understands how hard they are working
too. “He’s got a following of people willing to go to battle with
him.”

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