On Wednesday, employees of Twitter woke up to a stern warning from new owner Elon Musk.  During the early morning hours, CEO Elon Musk sent out a memo to his staff reminding them the “office is not optional.”

According to a Fox Business report, the Platformer managing editor Zoë Schiffer stated that Elon Musk was annoyed that his office building was half empty the day prior and at 2:30am Musk gave his employees a reality check.

Twitter was hemorrhaging cash before he took over the company and after reducing the number of employees significantly, the company is beginning to turn a profit. Musk has long believed remote style work is not the answer for a company to succeed. In 2019, Musk tweeted that remote work comes with a price.

“Big communication penalty for remote work,” he wrote, “which means the gain in talent that won’t move has to be very high.”

After Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he directed his Ireland workforce to return to work immediately and many opponents to that directive had plenty to say.  Some even went so far as to say “There is literally [sic] not enough housing in Dublin for them to do so.”

“This is false,” Musk quickly asserted.

“Anyone who can be in office, should be,” he wrote. “However, if not logistically possible or they have essential personal matters, then staying home is fine. Working remotely is also ok if their manager vouches for excellence. Same policy as Tesla & SpaceX.”

In the San Francisco office, Musk attempted to stop the bleeding of cash by having employees pay for lunch rather than the company supplying lunch noting,  “almost no one came to the office.”

In a report from Fox Business, Musk also required employees of Tesla to spend a minimum of 40 hours of work in the office per week, reiterating “Remote work is no longer acceptable.”

The Wall Street Journal has said Americans got used to working from home in their pajamas in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but those days are now over.

“Some 72.5% of business establishments said their employees teleworked rarely or not at all last year, according to a Labor Department report released this week,” the Journal reported. “That figure climbed from 60.1% in 2021. The survey showed about 21 million more workers on-site full time in 2022, compared with the prior year.”

“Employers recently have begun pushing harder to get staff to work on-site more often, as recession fears prompt an increased emphasis on worker productivity.”