Elon Musk works 7 days a week with 2 am naps, late night meetings, former employee reveals

Elon Musk’s reputation for working nonstop is well-known, but a recent tweet from a former X employee gives a closer look at just how intense his days can be. Chris Bakke, who used to report directly to Musk, shared a glimpse of the CEO’s daily schedule that sounds almost impossible to keep up with.

According to Bakke, Musk would spend the first ten hours of his day with the Tesla team. Only after that would he start X product meetings, usually around 5 or 6 in the evening. Individual check-ins, like Bakke’s one-on-one meetings, often happened at 10 PM but were frequently pushed back to 11 PM, midnight, or even 1 AM. And even then, Musk’s day wasn’t over. Around 2 AM, he would take a short nap at the office for a couple of hours before starting it all over again with a new set of companies. This routine, Bakke says, went on seven days a week.

Musk’s extreme work ethic isn’t new. Over the years, he’s repeatedly said that long hours and dedication are central to success. In a 2014 commencement speech at USC’s Marshall School of Business, Musk explained that working harder than everyone else gives you a clear advantage. “If somebody else is working 50 hours per week and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year,” he told graduates.

The billionaire’s commitment to work stretches back to his earliest ventures. Musk has shared stories of sleeping in offices, showering at the YMCA, and working late into the night when he and his brother started their first company. During Tesla’s Model 3 production crunch in 2018, Musk famously slept on the factory floor to stay close to operations. He joked that he couldn’t sleep on the couch because it was too narrow.