Why Elon Musk says taking ‘vacations will kill you’

[GucciGang]

After success with his early internet start-ups, Elon Musk became what everyone in the late 1990s wanted to be: a dotcom millionaire.

In 1999, Musk sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq for roughly $300 million. After that, he went on to start X.com, which eventually became PayPal. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion.

 

In 2002, he founded SpaceX, which is worth an estimated $33 billion, and in 2003, he founded Tesla, which has a current market cap of about $57 billion.

Though Musk had much success, he has not had a lot of time off. In fact, according to Musk, “vacations will kill you.”

Why the aversion to vacations? It’s partially due to work. Musk said on Recode Decode that to successfully build his start-ups, he would have to work over 100 hours a week.

And not much has changed.

In 2018, for example, Musk was sleeping on the Tesla factory floor in an effort to catch up production on the Model 3 cars.

 

“I don’t have time to go home and shower,” he told Gayle King on “CBS This Morning.”

“I don’t believe people should be experiencing hardship while the CEO is, like, off on vacation,” he said.

In addition to working all the time, Musk — who says he has only tried to take off a handful of times — has had terrible luck when it comes to vacations.

In 2015, Musk said that he had only taken off twice in more than a decade, and both times were problematic.

“In the last 12 years, I only tried to take a week off twice,” he said in 2015 on Danish television. “The first time I took a week off, the Orbital Sciences rocket exploded and Richard Branson’s [Virgin Galactic] rocket exploded in that same week.

“The second time I took a week off, my rocket exploded,” Musk said.

“The lesson here is, don’t take a week off.”

Even before that, when Musk tried to take his first adult vacation, his honeymoon with first wife Justine in September 2000, he got bad professional news.

At the time, he was CEO of X.com, and company executives were not pleased with his leadership. While Musk was on the plane with Justine, executives delivered a letter of no-confidence to the company’s board, pushing Musk out as CEO, and replacing him with Peter Thiel. When he arrived for his honeymoon in Sydney, Australia, Musk had to immediately fly back to Palo Alto, California, according to the book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” by Ashlee Vance.

But perhaps Musk’s most traumatic vacation experience came when he and Justine decided to try and go on their honeymoon again that December.

Musk planned a two-week trip to Brazil and South Africa. While in South Africa, Musk contracted the most severe form of malaria. After two hospitals misdiagnosed him, he “came very close to dying,” said Musk in “Elon Musk,” before being properly treated in the nick of time.

“That’s my lesson for taking a vacation,” Musk said in the book. “Vacations will kill you.”

Since Musk’s disastrous trips, he has reportedly been on at least two vacations, including one to Chile and one to Australia.

[Sarvapindi]

Feekinav thi fillathulu...

[Beardman]

Microsoft experimented with a 4-day workweek, and productivity jumped by 40%

An experiment that involved reducing the workweek by one day led to a 40% boost in productivity in a Microsoft subsidiary in Japan, the technology giant announced last week.

The trial was part of Microsoft's "Work-Life Choice Challenge," a summer project that examined work-life balance and aimed to help boost creativity and productivity by giving employees more flexible working hours.

Microsoft Japan closed its offices every Friday in August and found that labor productivity increased by 39.9% compared with August 2018, the company said. Full-time employees were given paid leave during the closures.

The company said it also reduced the time spent in meetings by implementing a 30-minute limit and encouraging remote communication.

Microsoft isn't the first to highlight the productivity benefits of a four-day workweek. Andrew Barnes, the founder of a New Zealand estate-planning firm, Perpetual Garden, said he conducted a similar experiment and found that it benefited both employees and the company, according to CNBC. It has adopted the four-day workweek permanently.

Studies have found there's demand for a shorter workweek. Last year, in a study of nearly 3,000 workers in eight countries by the Workforce Institute at Kronos and Future Workplace, most said their ideal workweek would be four days or less.

It's not just the employees who benefited from Microsoft's four-day-workweek experiment — Microsoft found that it helped preserve electricity and office resources as well. The number of pages printed decreased by 58.7%, while electricity consumption was down by 23.1% compared with August 2018, the company said.

[lovemystate]

Yes if its your own business and you swallow the whole of profits its applicable. But if you are an employee and you get 100k when ceo gets 100 million you bloody well entitled to your vacation. 

[Quickgun_murugan]

14 minutes ago, Sarvapindi said:

Feekinav thi fillathulu...

[mustang302]

Veedi luck lo 0.001% unna chaalu na jeevithaniki..!

[Pillipilla]

Vacation does kill you in a way.