Opinion | Elon Musk Is the Worlds Richest Man. Why Is He Sleeping on an Office Floor?

Elon Musk hates the weekend.For well over a decade, the world’s richest man has proclaimed the necessity of working at least 80 hours a week — “peaking above 100 at times,” as he said in 2018 — in order “to change the world.” Now he and his subordinates at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are supposedly toiling up to 120 hours a week, which is why, in Mr.

Musk’s view, their “bureaucratic opponents” stand no chance.“It’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for two days!” Mr.

Musk recently remarked.“Working the weekend is a superpower.”This association between incessant work and entrepreneurial success is pervasive in American business culture today.

Jeff Bezos reports working 12 hours every day of the week in the early years of Amazon.The Apple chief executive Tim Cook is famous for sending emails at 4:30 a.m.

Mr.Musk’s ostensible boss, despite his well-known fondness for TV news and social media, also insists that “no president ever worked harder than me.”These boasts, plausible or not, reveal something important about the American valorization of work, and help explain why this class of supposedly busy billionaires has come to believe they’re entitled to dominate our national life.

For Mr.Musk and his associates, a herculean enthusiasm for work isn’t merely a way to get things done; it’s also a mark of innate superiority, a “superpower” that confers the right to impose their vision on the world.

Mr.Musk’s decades in the highest echelons of the tech industry, surrounded by other executives who justified their lordship over their private empires by trumpeting their inexhaustible work ethic, have taught him that if you work harder than everyone else, you should be rewarded with unquestioned rule over your dominion.

Now he is seeking to extend this logic into our government, transforming it, like one of his companies, into another personal fief.While the scope of Mr.Musk’s project may b...