Elon Musk already had a large portfolio of successful companies that he was running, much to the amazement of most in the field of tech, but being involved in US politics seems to have pushed his workload up even higher.
Elon Musk has said he’s now working as much as 120 hours a week. This translates to more than 17 hours a day, every day of the week. Musk says he has no choice but to maintain this schedule for a while.
“My workload went up from about, I don’t know, 70 to 80 hours a week to probably 120,” Musk said in an interview. “Yeah, I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work, do that seven days a week. I’ll have to do that for a while, so it’s no choice,” he added.
Musk is one of the most prolific entrepreneurs of all time. He’s currently running electric car company Tesla, space company SpaceX, social media network X, brain computer interface company Neuralink, and tunnel digging initiative The Boring Company. While his companies have made him the richest man in the world with a net worth of $350 billion, he’s managed to do this all while having 12 children, and somehow finding time to become one of the world’s top-ranked players in Diablo.
But Musk’s workload has increased significantly after his involvement in the US election. Minutes after Donald Trump was shot at during the campaign, Musk endorsed Trump for President. He’d then played a big part in Trump’s campaign efforts, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to the cause, and even setting up the America PAC to help elect Trump. Musk had also personally camped in the swing state of Pennsylvania to help draw out the vote. Trump had eventually carried Pennsylvania and all other swing states and become the President in a landslide victory. Since becoming President-Elect, Musk has been sitting in on Trump’s calls with leaders including Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and Google’s Sundar Pichai, and has been meeting with other world leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.
Running several companies and being involved in US government efforts has meant that Musk is now putting in 120 hours a week. Musk isn’t the only CEO that works long hours. In India, Infosys’ Narayan Murthy has said Indians need to work 70 hours a week to help turn the country into a developed nation, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang has said he works from the moment he gets to to the moment he goes to sleep to such a degree that he’s unable to remember plots of movies he’s seen because he’s thinking of work while watching them. This lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but it’s clear that putting in long hours might just be one of the prerequisites towards making an outsized mark in business — or in Musk’s case, in politics as well.