My Take | Elon Musk would have loved China’s 996 work culture

Now we know why Elon Musk loves China. It’s not just the moneymaking opportunities; it’s the work culture. Last week, the world’s sometimes richest man tweeted that workers at Twitter, which he has taken over, had better be committed to work “hardcore” or resign immediately with severance pay. That came after he banned everyone from working from home, a legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic. His latest ultimatum has sparked further outrage, as more staff quit in protest.

However, the hardcore work commitment he now demands of Twitter employees likely won’t hold a candle to what is sometimes called “996” in China, an unwritten rule whereby many mainland Chinese firms, but especially those in the tech field, expect employees to work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, usually without overtime pay. Japanese workers and civil servants used to have something similar. I read somewhere during the height of the Japanese economic bubble, colleagues often told each other to go home before sunrise.

I imagine many bosses, perhaps even some wage slaves in China cheered. “Pampering [employees] is not management,” I read on one viral thread on Weibo, which carried long and heated arguments over the pros and cons of Musk’s ultimatum. I don’t know how accurate it is but many in China seem to think Twitter employees were mostly snowflakes who were unreasonably pampered by the previous management until Musk sent them packing.

Musk has always enjoyed a good image and smooth relations in China. He once invited the Chinese ambassador to the United States to a test drive in an auto-piloted Tesla car with him. “The Gigafactory”, his mega production plant in Shanghai, already churns out half of Tesla’s total world output and now aims to produce 1 million electric vehicles a year. After the US, China is its biggest market.

In many Western publications, though, Musk is now the devil incarnate. In a Financial Times column, he has been compared to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Imagine that! Of course, he is not the only tech mogul sacking people right, left and centre. Meta, the parent of Facebook, and Amazon, and their (in)famous bosses have been doing the same, and all before Christmas. But at least they didn’t tweet about it, or do it with such gusto like Musk. To see this kind of chest-pounding of the alpha male CEO at sacking people en masse, you would have to go back to those infamous hostile takeovers of the 1980s immortalised by Michael Douglas in Wall Street, the movie.

Critics say Musk is running Twitter into the ground. That may be so, but then, their criticism may also be coloured by their own fondness for lax work discipline and work ethics typified by Twitter before his takeover. I wouldn’t write him off so quickly. What if he pulls it off? Well, then he really is a genius; and omelettes are not made without breaking eggs.