Sydney – Elon Musk got into a Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) fight with Australia’s third-richest man over how important it is to stop the trend of working from home that started during the pandemic.
This week, the CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) said in an internal email that “everyone at Tesla is required to spend at least 40 hours in the office each week” and “if you don’t show up, we’ll assume you quit.” Worker advocates were upset about the risk of getting the coronavirus because of this.
In a series of tweets, Scott Farquhar, who helped start the Australian company Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) Plc, made fun of the directive by saying it was “like something from the 1950s.” The “work from anywhere” policy of the U.S.-listed company was “key to our continued growth,” he said.
“Our goal is to grow Atlassian to 25,000 employees by FY26,” Farquhar said in the end. “Is anyone at Tesla interested?”
Musk replied, “The above tweets show why recessions are important for cleaning up the economy.”
This kind of back-and-forth is not unusual for Musk, who often uses Twitter to say things without apologies about sensitive topics.
During the pandemic, many tech companies in Silicon Valley switched to having employees work from both home and the office. Other companies set dates for employees to return to the office, but as new outbreaks happened, they had to be moved back.
Musk is the richest person in the world and also the CEO of SpaceX. He has a history of going up against other billionaires. In 2021, he replied to a tweet by Jeff Bezos about how successful Amazon.com Inc. had been by posting a picture of a second-place medal (NASDAQ: AMZN).
In 2017, Farquhar’s Atlassian co-founder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, worked with Musk. He publicly accepted and helped Musk make good on his offer to give South Australia, which had a blackout in 2017, a powerful Tesla battery installation.
Cannon-Brookes posted Farquhar’s comments criticising Musk’s order to return to the office. Since then, he has led a campaign to buy Australian energy company AGL Energy (OTC: AGLXY) Ltd. and speed up its switch to renewable power.
(Paragraph 3 of this story has been changed to say “U.S.-listed” instead of “London-listed”).
