By Rachael Bunyan For Mailonline

Published: 06:33 EDT, 1 June 2022 | Updated: 08:46 EDT, 1 June 2022

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told executive staff at the company they face being fired unless they work at least 40 hours a week in the office.

In a leaked email sent to workers with the miss-spelt subject line 'remote work is no longer acceptble', Musk wrote that any executive staff who wish to work remotely must be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week 'or depart Tesla'.

He added that the requirement for executive staff to work at least 40 hours in the office is 'less than we ask of factory workers'.

Musk continued: 'If there are particularly exceptional contributors for whom this is impossible, I will review and approve those exceptions directly.' 

Musk went on to write in the email that the office 'must be a main Tesla office, not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties, for example being responsble for Fremont factory human relations, but having your office in another state'. 

Responding to a question on Twitter from a follower about whether he has a comment to 'people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept', Musk wrote back: 'They should pretend to work somewhere else.'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told executive staff at the company they face being fired unless they work at least 40 hours a week in the office

In a leaked email sent to workers with the miss-spelt subject line 'remote work is no longer acceptble', Musk wrote that any executive staff who wish to work remotely must be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week 'or depart Tesla'

Musk has previously hit out against remote working policies and blasted Americans for 'trying to avoid going to work at all' and compared them to staff in China who stay at the factory 'burning the 3am oil'.

In April, staff at Tesla's Gigafactory were made to sleep at work when production resumed after a three-week shutdown. 

The factory started operating as a 'closed loop system to avoid further shutdowns caused by China's strict Zero Covid policy.

Workers were given a sleeping back and mattress and part of the factory floor to sleep on. 

Responding to a question on Twitter from a follower about whether he has a comment to 'people who think coming into work is an antiquated concept', Musk wrote back: 'They should pretend to work somewhere else'

Food of around $63 a day was provided to each employee but they were expected to work 12 hours a day, with one day off every six days.

Before the temporary measures were imposed, staff reportedly worked eight-hour shifts with four days on and two days off.   

Before Shanghai's lockdown on March 28, the Gigafactory produced 2,000 cars a day and made half of the vehicles the company delivered worldwide last year.

Last month, Musk, who is currently in negotiations with Twitter over buying the social media giant, seemingly took aim at the company's lax remote working policies.

He said he asked his Twitter followers if he should transform the company's Silicon Valley headquarters into a homeless shelters 'since no one shows up anyway'.

It comes after Twitter brass - who offered staffers the option of working from home 'forever' during the pandemic - reopened its offices March 15, with remote work remaining an option for staffers.

More than a month later, as Silicon Valley's tech workers are starting to filter back to the office as Covid-19 cases plummet, it looks as if the CEO's faith in staffers' desire to return to work in-person was misplaced - something new board member Musk seemed to hone in on with his evidently mocking post.

Google, for instance, told employees in April that it would begin requiring employees to return in person at least three days a week.

Apples's headquarters in Cupertino, California, are pictured above. The company delayed plans to bring employees back to the office three days per week citing Covid surges

Last month, Apple announced it was delaying plans to bring employees back to the office three days a week as Covid cases in its home state of California surged once again.

The tech company blamed recent Covid-19 surges in California for the delay of the three day a week requirement. Workers must still come in two days a week, but it remains unclear when the three-day-a-week rule will be enforced.

The now-suspended plan required employees to work from the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Employees have been going to the Apple office two days a week since April, and there has been no indication that requirement will be changed.

Apple blamed surging Covid-19 cases as the reason for the requirement's delay, but the three day per week plan has been controversial among staff since it was announced.

The former director of machine learning at Apple, Ian Goodfellow, made headlines in May when he quit his job in protest at the company's three days per week demands.

Ian Goodfellow, Apple's director of machine learning, has quit in protest at their policies forcing people back to their offices three days a week

In his resignation note, Goodfellow insisted that office flexibility was best for his team. 

'I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team,' he said, according to The Verge. 

Goodfellow is not the only Apple employee dissatisfied with new office requirements. A survey of workers from April 13-19 found 67 percent saying they were dissatisfied with the return-to-office policy, Fortune reported.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook has been adamant about the return to office of his employees, insisting that a hardware-heavy company like Apple needs its employees physically together to design its physical products.

In early March, he wrote to staff saying they needed to prepare to return.

'In the coming weeks and months, we have an opportunity to combine the best of what we have learned about working remotely with the irreplaceable benefits of in-person collaboration,' Cook said in the memo, according to Bloomberg

Apple CEO Tim Cook insists that a hardware company like Apple needs its employees to be in the office to collaborate on the design of its physical products

Many employees however insist that they can do the work just as well remotely, and that they don't want to lose their work-life balance. 

'Everything happened with us working from home all day, and now we have to go back to the office, sit in traffic for two hours, and hire people to take care of kids at home,' says a former Apple employee anonymously told Bloomberg in April, 'Working from home has so many perks. Why would we want to go back?'

Employees have also been quick to point out that while they spend their days designing products that enable work from home across the world, they are required to return to an office.   

'We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely?' an open letter signed by more than 1,050 Apple employees read.

'How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?'

Twitter, meanwhile, has not issued any in-person requirements for its staffers - a decision Musk seemingly panned in his post.

It is not only tech companies that have faced backlash from employees about returning to the office - banks are also struggling to bring staff back into the office.

Goldman Sachs, notorious for its long-hours culture, pushed for bringing staff in the office five days a week after only half of the bank's 10,000 person staff reported to headquarters in New York City when the office reopened on Feb. 1 following the Omicron surge.

Goldman is one of a handful of financial institutions to get staff back in the office five days a week – after CEO David Solomon described working from home a 'temporary aberration'.

He said that being in the office is 'critical' to company operations.

Solomon has repeatedly argued that remote work 'is not ideal for us, and it's not a new normal.'

He has maintained his distaste for remote work throughout the pandemic, arguing that one of Goldman Sachs' strengths is its network of staff collaborating together to serve clients.

He believes that working from home inhibits relationship building and growth.

Solomon, pictured in 2020, branded working from home 'an abberation,' was spinning at the BottleRock music festival's silent disco in Napa Valley on Sunday

'The secret sauce to our organization is, we attract thousands of really extraordinary young people who come to Goldman Sachs to learn to work, to create a network of other extraordinary people, and work very hard to serve our clients,' he told CNBC in March.

'Part of the secret sauce is that they come together and collaborate and work with people that are much more experienced than they are.'

Although he acknowledged that some businesses have made remote successful, he doesn't believe that is the best operating model for his company.

'I do think for a business like ours which is an innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture, this is not ideal for us and it's not a new normal,' he said.

Goldman Sachs reported its best years ever over the past two years, with the company recording a profit of $21.6billion in 2021.

Meanwhile, the number of trips Americans are making to their workplace has dropped significantly when compared to pre-pandemic figures, a new report found last month, as the nation gives into 'work from home' culture, and employees begin to refuse to return to work - or stay in positions that require them to go to the office each day.

A new study by Work From Home Research, a research group making up economists from the U.S, UK and Mexico that hopes to gauge the feelings of the global workforce coming out of the pandemic, used phone location data to find that American trips to work every day have dropped by 20 percent when compared to pre-pandemic figures.

Survey results reported by the researchers also found that the average American employee is now working 1.5 days per week from home. 

Americans seem to have dug in on what researchers describe as 'work from home culture' as well, with 15 percent saying they would likely look for a new job if they were told they had to return to the office five days a week.

The report comes as Americans look towards a new potential workplace landscape heading out of the pandemic. 

Some companies, like Airbnb and Twitter, have introduced permanent work from home in an effort to entice staff to stay on-board, while others like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have brought employees back to the office in recent months.

Meanwhile, the continued explosion in the popularity of working from home is directly responsible for a 15.1 per cent of the increase in the average house prices.

Analysis found that home work - which became normal for tens of millions during the pandemic - was responsible for the majority of the 23.8 per cent increase in house prices between December 2019 and November 2021.

Researchers found that the number of American work trips has dropped 20% from before the pandemic, trailing only the UK in the level of reduction

More than one-in-ten U.S. workers say they would leave their job if they were asked to work from the office five days a week, a middling total compared to other peer nations 

The shift to working remotely during the pandemic is partly responsible for driving house prices in the United States higher as people sought out larger and nicer properties to work from.

Statistics provided from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that by the end of the period, 42.8% of employees in the US were still working from home part or full time. 

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