Elon Musk ‘s message , posted on Twitter several weeks ago, read as follows: “DOGE works 120 hours a week. Our bureaucratic opponents work, optimistically, 40 hours a week. That’s why they are losing so fast.” Adding to the conversation the fact that it would be very hard, and that they would do it for free, only served to further fuel a debate about productivity in which, in reality, everything has long been said.

The working day according to Elon Musk

In the face of criticism that a 120-hour work week is complete madness – we are talking about an average of more than 17 hours a day, more than double the eight hours that we consider the standard in much of the world – many of Elon Musk ‘s defenders stepped in to read between the lines. According to them, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX was speaking hyperbolically. He wasn’t.

The key is that this is not the first time that the 120-hour work week has been put on the table by Musk himself. Sold to the public as one of those self-made multimillionaire geniuses, he never hesitates to boast about how hard he works, with marathon days in which he doesn’t rest on weekends and barely sleeps six hours a day.

The idea of ​​the 120 hours comes, in fact, from when he assured The Wall Street Journal that, during the production of the Tesla Model 3, his life revolved only around it and that he even slept in his office at the headquarters when his body could not take it anymore and he did not want to waste time going to and from home. An idea that he has recently shared again with DOGE employees to be as efficient and productive as possible.

But of all the controversies surrounding Elon Musk and his work at the helm of DOGE, his obsession with modifying the working day and increasing productivity is precisely the one that has the most studies behind it. Years of research in which the exact point at which to increase efficiency while reducing fatigue has been found to, in the long run, turn us into authentic productivity machines. To no one’s surprise, the 120-hour week is not even close to what these analyses establish.

The productivity of working 120 hours a week

We tend to think that more hours in a workday equal more work, and that if you keep adding time, productivity will always go up accordingly. What the studies tell us, contrary to what Elon Musk argues , is that there is a sweet spot where you can maintain maximum worker efficiency without affecting their stress and fatigue while maintaining similar results.

These are not recent studies that take advantage of discourses such as the reduction of working hours or the 4-day work week , mind you, we are talking about work that goes back to analyzing real results dating back to 1929, when the average working day was extended to 49 hours. In his research on The Productivity of Working Hours , John Pencavel noted that, after 50 hours, productivity was drastically reduced.