No, but it's fair for a company to mandate some minimum level of behavior that reflects a baseline of values. A cable company I worked for had fewer holidays than most other companies, even for their corporate employees. The rationale was that if the line cable installer or phone rep was schlepping in to work, then so should the marketing guy.
I would say usually this is deftly handled at other tech companies (MSFT, AAPL, Netflix, Facebook, Google) by outsourcing all meal preparation, cleaning services, security, low level IT, contract manufacturing to other companies. That way there is not a separate class within the same company. This works most of the time to not create a press $*$!storm.
The challenge for Elon (and Bezos/Jassy) is that his two of his companies rely on physical labor and can't outsource the physical part but still need tech talent that could otherwise WFH.
I don't envy him or Bezos/Jassy...
If you don't say stuff like this you have folks even on the tech side who will protest (i.e. TBray of AWS VP).
"I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of COVID-19," he wrote.
I think its important to realize that Elon's smart enough to realize that part of his job is performative - for his primary investors/faithful (i.e. Cathie Wood, Tesla Daily, Hyperchange, Ross Gerber).
They want Tesla to maintain that original "Elon sleeping under desks", all hands on deck, Tesla hunger of yore. To them - they probably were concerned about the design teams getting to soft from WFH and getting uppity.
Also a symptom of that management style is measuring input not outcomes.
A star worker for them is someone who works 16 hours a day, adds 10K lines of code and sleeps under their desk. Not someone who goes for a long walk in the park while thinking deeply about the problem, and then spends half an hour at the keyboard refactoring to remove 1000 lines of code and clear a major performance bottleneck.
Elon may be performing for his shareholders, but if he was actually smart he'd be informing them. It's notable how many of the actually-smart rockstar CEO's didn't seem to care what their shareholders thought.
Step 1 is not necessarily the worst idea, but it depends on you hiring competent people and managers (and it sounds like everything that followed was a result of this failure.)
At least the initial hiring of consultants was done publicly. (Subcontracting is usually not done via public tender, since it is assumed that the main contractor's bid includes the complexity and cost of whatever subcontractors they might need, and requiring public tender for everything would slow things down significantly.)
The problem was that actually following the advice to keep minimal in-house staff who could check the work was really stupid, no matter who would win such tenders.
Nitpick: "expensive" may be the wrong word there, to me that implies some kind of runtime cost. The stated reason for the keyword is that it forces users to think a little bit more about mutability. You may want do this because safe mutability requires exclusive ownership.
I don't know what your definition of corporate slave is, but you can certainly become wealthy off a salary.
Just limiting to software engineering (there's other lucrative fields out there) you can easily make a six-figure income remotely. This gives you the freedom to live somewhere with very low cost of living. It's not hard to build wealth this way.
You could debate that getting the necessary skills to get a job like this is harder than it should be.. that corporations themselves are broken.. whatever your worldview is that's fine but "cannot get wealthy off salary" is just plain false.
> Under the current framework, you cannot get wealthy off of salary.
You can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as an engineer, without even talking about stock. I'd call that wealthy. If you're an engineer of some stature, 7 figures TC yearly is not out of reach.
