Underneath all the trolling and bad jokes, Elon Musk knows that his actions send a powerful message. It’s why he dared police to come and arrest him when Tesla’s factories stayed open during the early days of the pandemic, saying he would be “on the line with everyone else.”
As such, it’s no surprise that Musk—the newly-appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—has reportedly decided to engage in one of his favorite spectacles: sleeping at the office.
Elon goes to Washington. Wired reports that Musk has been telling his friends that he’s sleeping in DOGE’s offices, which are housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. DOGE’s offices are 0.2 miles from the White House, according to Google Maps, or a four-minute walk.
While sleeping in the office on a regular basis may seem alarming to most people, doing so has become a part of Musk’s management style over the years. In the past, the billionaire has indicated that this activity helps promote the relentless pace and long hours, a culture he has sometimes referred to as “hardcore,” he likes at his companies.
Not his first rodeo. Musk became known for sleeping on the factory floor and under his desk at Tesla. In 2018, a year when the Tesla Model 3 was behind its production schedule, Musk said he had been sleeping on the factory floor and had no time to go home and shower. In an interview that year, he called 2018 “the most difficult and painful of my career.”
“I don’t believe like people should be experiencing hardship while the CEO is, like, off on vacation,” Musk said.
The billionaire employed the same strategy when he bought Twitter, later renamed X, in 2022. After the acquisition was complete, Musk began sleeping at X’s offices in San Francisco. He even had a favorite sleeping nook.
“There’s a library that nobody goes to, up on the seventh floor. And, uh, there’s a couch there, and I sleep there sometimes,” Musk said in 2023.
Why does Musk sleep in offices? The billionaire addressed his tendency to sleep at his company’s offices in an interview with Baron Capitol CEO Ron Baron in 2022.
“This is important because if the team thinks their leader is off somewhere having a good time, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island, which I definitely could have been doing … since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, they knew I was there, and that made a huge difference, they gave it their all,” he said.
In the case of Twitter, he certainly set an example. Shortly after his acquisition was complete, a director at Twitter named Esther Crawford went viral for sleeping at the office and posting a picture of herself in a sleeping bag with the caption: “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.”
Foreshadowing of what’s to come. Overall, if Musk is indeed sleeping at DOGE’s offices, it provides a glimpse of what he might do in his capacity as President Donald Trump’s advisor. While the federal government isn’t a private company, Musk seems to intend to treat it like one. It won’t be easy: Federal employees are guaranteed certain rights and Musk is limited by what he can do under the law.
