Elon Musk's anti-remote working crusade is betrayed by his own Elden Ring confessions

Elon Musk, billionaire and self-confessed 'power-mage' (albeit decent with a sword and katana), might've put his foot in it once more following his comments regarding work-from-home; especially when considering his prior tweeting about what he does in his 'spare time'.

Specifically, how can someone who says they work 20-hour days, or 17-hour days, also complete an intensive video game- within months of release?

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Elon Musk has performed a number of interviews recently, and it seems like he's been given an easy ride. People are starting to pick up on the fact that nobody has asked him about Elden Ring:

People want Elon Musk to be asked about Elden Ring. Well, Indy100 are more than happy to help - 'Timothy Faust'.

In an interview segment with CNBC titled Tesla CEO Elon Musk: ‘The laptop class is living in la-la land’ over work-from-home, Musk declared that remote working is a 'moral issue'. He believes that because a working class commutes to working locations to build cars or cook food - that other workers should also commute.

Musk has said before that he works 20 hours a day. He says in the above interview that he sleeps six hours a day. He has routinely said he commits to 80-100 hour workweeks. During his early days at Twitter, he said he was working 24/7. Musk works a lot. Based on the latest interview where he says he sleeps six hours a day, Musk has around 18 hours per day to either work or not work.

There are 168 hours in a week. Based on the 80-100 hour workweek comments, Elon, at maximum, spends 60 per cent (14 hours a day) of his time working, leaving nine hours for sleep and recreation. If he sleeps six hours, he has three or four hours for everything else - including Elden Ring.

He admitted that on May 23rd that the game was the 'most beautiful art he had ever seen.'

Elon, I cannot disagree. As someone who spammed Rivers of Blood to murder four end-game bosses in an hour with a raging headache following weeks of failure, Elden Ring to me is also art.

However, when he is saying he has experienced Elden Ring in its entirety, and that his workweek is so intense, there's a contradiction.

My playtime with Elden Ring is around 120 hours. I played it damn near every day in marathon stints with a few week-long pauses when my own rapid deaths in a playthrough were mangling my mind.

I finished the game in June. I started it in February. It took me - apparently - until early March to beat the first three bosses in my list of achievements on Xbox - Leonine Misbegotten, Margit the Fell Omen and Shardbearer Godrick. I am somewhat awful at the game. I beat the game. I do wish I recorded my pre-patch decimation of Radahn, though.

I won't go into the description of Musk's build, but it's terrible. Kotaku went in on it. My build was pretty cheesy and I could bonk enemies on the head and kill them in seconds. If I took 120 hours to experience close to everything in Elden Ring, there's no way Elon completed it quicker with the build that had him 'fat rolling' all over the place.

My experience has me completing Elden Ring in 100 days - give or take. That's 1.2 hours per day. I do not work the number of hours a day that Elon says he does.

Assuming Elon completed Elden Ring in the same time as I did, he'd spent around 25 percent of his non-working time playing Elden Ring until completion. That's based on him having around four hours to himself without working or sleeping.

The only figure we've got to use for Elon's completion date is the day he posted 'Elden Ring experienced in its entirety most beautiful art he had ever seen' - May 24th 2022. This is 87 days after Elden Ring's US release on February 25th.

Assuming Elon completed the game on May 24th, and assuming he started on February 25th, that gives him 348 non-working hours in the 87 days between release and completion. If he spent 120 hours on Elden Ring (like my completion time) alone, a third of his non-working time between February and May was spent playing Elden Ring.

For a person as busy as Elon appears to be, I feel like it's also fairly implausible to suggest a duel business owner (at the time) and parent who says they work that much could spend a third of their non-working time playing a video game.

There are 8760 hours in a year. Elon sleeps for 2190 hours (25 percent of his time), he works for 5082 hours (58 percent of his time with two days off accounted for) and has around 1489 hours spare (17 percent of his time.) Obviously, this is all estimation and approximation - Musk may not be entirely serious when he says what he says, and every day is probably going to differ. Alas.

That means that he spent 8 percent of his spare time last year playing Elden Ring. That in itself is not specifically odd, but by Elon's own admission, he has less time than everyone else as he is so busy. A man who had so little time spent so much of it gaming. That is pure dedication or exaggeration.

To take the words, well, word-for-word, it'd seem obvious that Musk is exaggerating, or twisting words to make a more brutal point than needed. At the same time, it feels odd to say that in an interview where you're hitting WFH employees over the head - you'd want to be taken seriously, right?

He was asked off the cuff. He replied off the top of his head. There's no problem, except that the context of Musk's words in the interview relates to dismissing remote working and the 'laptop class'. Where did Elon actually find the time to play Elden Ring? Was becoming Elden Lord classed as work in his mind (probably, and fair enough).

The only way to test this is to get a brave Twitter/Tesla/SpaceX employee to say that playing Elden Ring on company time counts as 'work'. Then we'll see what happens.

As for Elon and remote working, let those without sin cast the stones, and perhaps let your workers breathe a little. That's the real moral issue.

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