I’ve done many many stretches of one-hundred-hour weeks—true one-hundred-hour weeks, sleeping roughly six hours per day. I would not recommend that. That’s for emergencies, not all the time.
During difficult times at Tesla I’ve had to do it, and sometimes at the beginning of my earliest startups I did that. I wouldn’t leave the office. I would sleep under my desk and work seven days a week. Sometimes it’s necessary for success, or to avoid failure.203
Tesla is pretty far up there in terms of work ethic, anywhere in the world. The Tesla work ethic is substantially greater than any other large car or manufacturing company in the US, that I’m aware of.204
If there was a crisis situation, I slept on the floor. Most of the time I did not sleep in a conference room because people could not see me in the conference room—I slept on the floor in the factory. Otherwise how would people know? They wouldn’t. Seeing is believing. I slept on the floor outside the conference room so they could see I was there.205
When the team is being asked to work super hard, I have to be right there with them and they have to see it. If I fall asleep in the middle of the factory floor at four in the morning and wake up four hours later, they see that. They are like, “If the CEO is willing to take that level of pain, I can do it too.”206
It was a world of hurt. I would wake up smelling like oil and iron filings. It was rough. But I was asking people to really go all out. I can’t expect them to go all out if I’m not doing the same.207