Elon Musk's tirade about the 'laptop classes living in la la land' is the latest step in his crusade against remote working
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- Elon Musk's attack on remote working is just one of many in recent years.
- The billionaire made clear in an interview with CNBC that he still wasn't a fan of the practice.
- Musk and other key business figures Keith Rabois and Marc Andreessen are united in their criticism.
Elon Musk has attacked the practice of remote working again, mocking those who do so as the "laptop classes" who are "living in la la land."
It's far from the first time he's made such comments, which he has often backed with action; after taking over Twitter last year, one of his first moves was to scrap its remote-working policy in an email sent to staff at 2:30 am.
Musk's most recent attack on remote working came in a wide-ranging interview with CNBC on Tuesday. The billionaire suggested that people who work from home were detached from reality.
"It's like really, you're going to work from home and you're going to make everyone else who made your car come in [to] the factory?" Musk said.
"The people who make your food that gets delivered, they can't work from home? The people that fix your house, they can't work from home?"
Musk's comments come as the war on the "laptop class" has gathered momentum in Silicon Valley in recent years, with critics claiming that the persistence of the remote working boom that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a proliferation of "fake work."
Last year, Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen defined the "laptop class" as a group of "Western upper-middle-class professionals who work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-work consequences of their opinions and beliefs."
That view has been echoed in recent months by PayPal mafia member and investor Keith Rabois, who suggested in March that tech firms had become bloated with a bunch of people who sat around doing laptop-based jobs, which involved little more than "fake work."
Several tech firms have acknowledged that they over-hired during the pandemic, leading them to undertake significant rounds of layoffs that have impacted a lot of middle-manager roles that are laptop-based.
In the CNBC interview, Musk said that people working from home was as much a "moral issue" as it was a productivity one. Employees working for his other companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are expected to work in the office.
Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
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