Elon Musk sparks backlash after issuing 48-hour assignment to employees: ‘This is due by noon on Thursday’

Elon Musk sparks backlash after issuing 48-hour assignment to employees: ‘This is due by noon on Thursday’

Elon Musk once again wants workers to justify their worth.

The billionaire CEO of xAI sent an email to the artificial intelligence company’s workers giving them 48 hours to submit a one-page description of what they did in the past month and what they plan to do in the next month, CNN reported.

“This is due by noon on Thursday,” instructed the email, which was sent Tuesday.

Requiring workers to quickly justify their roles has been a recurring theme of Musk’s management style. During his short-lived foray into government, his Department of Government Efficiency made similar demands of federal employees in multiple agencies, NPR reported.

Similarly, when Musk took over Twitter, now X, he required programmers to print out all the code they had written in the last 30 days, per Bloomberg.

The demand placed on xAI workers came among other recent moves at the company, as the AI arms race has continued to heat up.

Recently, xAI reconfigured its data annotation team, firing 600 of the unit’s 1,500 employees and placing a 2023 high school graduate in charge, Business Insider reported.

Musk’s management techniques have been highly controversial, with some business experts saying that fear-based tactics have been proved ineffective.

“While Musk’s methods may drive short-term compliance, research and real-world examples show that leading with fear ultimately backfires, reducing morale, fostering resentment, and leading to high turnover,” Black Isle Group CEO and Nudge.ai creator Jeremy Campbell wrote for Raconteur. “Great leaders don’t demand productivity, they inspire it by fostering trust, empowerment, and a sense of purpose.”

The competition for top AI talent has become increasingly fierce. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently accused Meta of trying to poach workers with $100 million signing bonuses, CNBC reported in June.

As AI becomes more widely adopted, critics have warned that the technology could make many human workers obsolete, leading to massive job losses.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes referred to as “The Godfather of AI,” told the Financial Times. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”

Other AI skeptics have pointed to the massive toll the technology — and the enormous, energy-hungry data centers required to power it — has taken on the environment.

In a May interview, Kenza Bryan, a climate reporter for the Financial Times, spoke to PBS about the impact of AI data centers on the environment.

“Their environmental impact is huge, and it’s growing,” Bryan said. “AI data centers are massively contributing to the continued rise in power demand, which itself contributes to the continued rise in global emissions.

“And most importantly, it’s growing faster than grid capacities. And even more importantly, it’s growing faster than renewable energy growth, which means that even as data center energy use grows, clean energy from wind, solar, nuclear … is lagging behind.”

To his credit, Musk has expressed more support for renewable energy than many other tech CEOs. However, much work remains to be done to ensure that AI does not contribute to rising global temperatures and higher electricity prices.

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