Billionaire Elon Musk is the richest person in the world. As CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, electric car company Tesla and neurotechnology company Neuralink, as well as founder of The Boring Company, which constructs tunnels, Musk has a lot to manage each day.
“I work a lot,” Musk told Joe Rogan during the latest episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “Normally, I’ll be in meetings at work until 1 or 2 in the morning. Saturday [and] Sunday, usually not, but sometimes.”
So, how does Musk have time to do it all? He keeps his time sleeping to a minimum.
Musk gets “about six hours” of sleep, he told Rogan. “I tried sleeping less, but then total productivity decreases,” he said. “I don’t find myself wanting more sleep than six [hours].”
Musk has said that in the past he worked hundreds of hours a week. Sometimes the billionaire would even sleep on the floor under his desk at, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“There were times when, some weeks … I haven’t counted exactly, but I would just sort of sleep for a few hours, work, sleep for a few hours, work, seven days a week,” Musk told Kara Swisher in November 2018, recalling his effort to ramp up Tesla Model 3 production. “Some of those [weeks] must have been 120 hours or something nutty.”
Musk admitted that schedule was not healthy, telling Swisher that he had “burnt out a bunch of neurons.”
“No one should put this many hours into your work,” he told Axios in 2018. ”[It’s] not recommended for anyone. You’re gonna go a little bonkers if you work 120 hours a week.”