Elon Musk Isn't As Smart About AI As He Thinks

Elon Musk just identified which jobs go first, and it destroys every assumption about who’s safe.

Musk: “AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning. Anything that is digital, which is like just someone at a computer doing something.”

Not factory workers. Office workers.… pic.twitter.com/J3MljMlgp9

— Dustin (@r0ck3t23) February 17, 2026

So Elon has passed down his wisdom from on high. The jobs that AI will replace are

Analyst, accountant, paralegal, programmer, anyone producing files and documents, automates first because digital work is exactly what AI does natively.

But back in June 2022, he sang a different tune:

Elon Musk has told Tesla employees to come back into their respective offices at least 40 hours a week or leave the company. Similar emails were sent to SpaceX, according to The New York Times.

Musk said in two separate emails that people must show up for at least 40 hours per week in a main Tesla office. “If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned,” he said in one of the emails, first reported by Electrek and also obtained by CNBC.

“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” Musk said in the first email, according to Electrek. “This is less than we ask of factory workers.”

Let's parse this out. Following the COVID lockdowns, workers were divided into two categories, "essential" and "non-essential". For instance, the US Department of Labor said,

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, our nation’s essential workers redefined what it truly means to show up for your neighbor. When everyone else was encouraged to stay at home to be safe, essential workers did not have that option. These workers gave the nation a new understanding of and appreciation for the vital jobs they do and the services they provide us every single day.

It went on to enumerate what "essential" jobs were, "from care workers to farmworkers, nurses to grocery store clerks, childcare workers to teachers, port truck drivers and warehouse workers". The others were either laid off or "worked from home". The "essential" category isn't all that far from the groups Elon says will still keep their jobs after AI, "Anything that’s physically moving atoms. . . those jobs will exist for a much longer time.”

So let me get this straight. As an employer, Elon was fully aware that there was a huge contingent of office workers at Tesla and SpaceX that were "non-essential" and thus "working from home". About 18 months into COVID, it began to bother him that he wasn't getting what he expected from these "non-essential" workers, and he ordered them back to the office for a weekly 40 hours of minimum face time. But even before COVID, "working from home" had become a perk, not a hardship, especially for the bosses.

No need to set the alarm. no need to dress up, no need to see the people you didn't want to see, no need to be at your desk and look busy -- in short, no need to pretend you were doing something important. You stayed home, took meetings remotely, ran errands, took the kids to soccer practice, watched TV, surfed the web. And this was in the 1990s, two decades before COVID. COVID just made it possible for workers other than bosses to "work from home", which was never anything more than a big scam. Elon was betginning to tip wise to this even before AI came into the picture.

In fact, business-school conventional wisdom had the truth in plain sight long before that. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "What is the 80-20 rule?" It answered,

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a general observation that roughly 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes. At its core, it highlights a predictable imbalance between inputs and outputs, suggesting that a small minority of efforts usually leads to the majority of results.

. . . Management consultant Joseph M. Juran, who popularized the term in the 1940s, described the 20% of high-impact causes as the "vital few" and the remaining 80% as the "useful many".

Among the many corollaries is the observation that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I wish I could have the chance to ask Elon if he ever tried to find out if he actually got more productivity out of those "non-essential" workers when he ordered them back to the office. My bet is they returned to the office and were as productive as the 80-20 rule would predict -- a core 20% continued to keep things running, while 80% went to meetings, surfed the web, called thier brokers, gossiped around the coffee pot, went outside on smoke breaks, and goofed off in the cafeteria.

In short, 80% of Elon's workers at Tesla and SpaceX were "non-essential" and functionally "working from home" even before the lockdowns, and I have a sense that before 2022, he never quite grasped this. After he took over Twitter/X, he may hsve gotten a little smarter. According to Wikipedia,

On November 16 [2022], Musk delivered an ultimatum to employees via email: commit to "extremely hardcore" work in order to realize Musk's vision of "Twitter 2.0", or leave. In response, hundreds of Twitter employees resigned the next day, hours before the deadline to respond to Musk's email. Business Insider reported that fewer than 2,000 employees remained at the company.

. . . In April 2023, Musk told the BBC that he had reduced staff from around 8,000 to under 1,500.

But there was no mention of AI. He just cut broad swaths of conventional company functions, no need even to replace them with anything:

In November 2022, Axios reported that Twitter had fired almost all of its communications team, leaving only one member. From November 2022 to March 2023, Twitter's communications team was "effectively silent" and not responding to press inquiries, reported NPR. In March 2023, Musk personally announced a new Twitter policy, which brought Twitter in-line with Musk's other businesses which do not have press or communications departments. During the April 2023 controversy, NPR confirmed that a press inquiry it sent to Twitter was responded to by Twitter with an emoji of feces.

So it seems to me that, at least before AI became a thing, Elon was perfectly willing to replace "non-essential" workers, indeed whole departments of them, with nothing. Why spend a bunch of money on AI? In addition, there's still a need for IT jobs; someone will need to upgrade, maintain, and support the AI programs at minimum. Something prints the payroll; that still needs maintenance and support. Companies will still need accountants if for no other reason than to tell AI how to do the bookkeeping and report the quarterly results. In fact, I would bet that AI might replace 80% of those workers, but not all of them.

But then, smart managers could just lay off 80% of the types who had to be forced to stop "working from home" even without AI. Instead, what's likely to happwn is that the usual suspects will turn corporate "AI" into just another huge boondoggle, and I'll bet that boondoggle will be just as big at Tesla and SpaceX. Heck, think of how AI will bloat the HR department with "human resource professionals". Some things won't change, even if Elon thinks he's smart enough to change them.