Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk says his workload has reached 120+ hours per week, leading to little sleep and growing back pain, as he runs multiple companies
At Tesla trial and in tweets, executive gives a glimpse into personal challenges — Elon Musk's Tesla Tweets Trial: What to Know
Context & Ripple Effects
Musk’s account of sustained 120-plus-hour weeks puts a personal constraint behind Twitter’s early operating upheaval. Coverage from the first weeks of ownership described chaos among current and former Twitter employees and a mandate ending remote work while requiring long in-office hours.
Tesla investors had already treated the Twitter deal as a management-distraction risk, with Tesla’s share decline after Musk disclosed his stake tied to concerns over the transaction’s structure and divided attention. The workload disclosure makes that trade-off more concrete across Musk’s companies.
First-order effects
- Musk’s limited sleep and health complaints concentrate operational risk in a single executive overseeing Twitter alongside Tesla and other businesses.
- Twitter staff are operating under demanding attendance expectations while their owner describes an unsustainable personal workload, reinforcing the severity of the post-acquisition work regime.
Second-order effects
- Tesla investors have a clearer basis to scrutinize whether Twitter absorbs leadership attention, extending the concern that accompanied Musk’s initial stake disclosure.
- Twitter’s ability to stabilize depends more heavily on executives and employees below Musk as his personal capacity becomes a visible constraint.
Third-order effects
- If multi-company founders remain central to day-to-day operations, investors and employees will increasingly price key-person capacity—not just strategy—into platform and public-company risk.
- The episode points to an ownership model in which operational disruption at one company can transmit to affiliated businesses through a shared executive’s time and health.
The trend: High-profile founders running several major companies are turning executive bandwidth into a material governance and market-risk issue.