In other words, it's not sustainable. Any business plan requiring all employees to be superheroes is a business plan destined for failure.

How’s that? Tesla, Amazon, Apple, have operated like this successfully for some time.

Apple? They might not be remote friendly but I've only heard stellar things about wlb. Amazon though, and any musk properties are notoriously run like sweatshops. Yeah maybe TSLA isn't massively overvalued and equity will continue to push that TC to the top tier, but call me a skeptic.

Maybe software. I personally know multiple mechanical engineers (smart ones from Berkeley) who were worked into the ground at Apple. Like >55h work weeks.

Even if tsla is massively overvalued (which I agree is likely) that doesn’t mean it’s a failed business plan, a crash of stock price back to “normal” does not mean the business plan is a failure. Aka even without high valuations tsla could have a toxic work place and still be stably producing successful cars.

I think I was misunderstanding the point you were making, thanks for elaborating.

Some OS teams were pretty stressed with extremely tight timelines and no additional headcount.

They don't require all employees to be superheroes. They've identified the key roles needing to go above and beyond and then focus on hiring high-quality employees. Superheroes not required. That's how you make it sustainable.

Working 40 hours a week is not a 'lifestyle business'. It's a limit imposed by law in a lot of the civilised world and exceptions to it are rare in every company I've ever worked at (inc. successful/exited startups). You don't have employees working more than 40 hours a week because you're working on a super hard problem and changing the world. You do it because you've convinced them of that bullshit and you want to minimise staff costs.

Look, I live in one of those "civilized" countries (continent really), and while I enjoy and need the work life balance, there may also be a reason Tesla, SpaceX and the FAANGs were founded in the US and not here. There are many other reasons too, but I recommend reading "Liftoff" about the early years of SpaceX to get a sense of what's needed here. Neither SpaceX nor Tesla would exist without the crazy work ethic of its leaders and employees. Tesla, despite being valued at ~$1 trillion is also far from a mature company and has the vast majority of its growth ahead. It's not a place for work life balance yet, maybe in 20 years but not now.

If you don't believe in Tesla's mission, that's ok, you don't have to work there. But plenty of people do, and so far they have been richly rewarded with their stock options 20X-ing over the past few years, making many of them millionaires.