Elon Musk needs to get some rest.
That’s the message Ariana Huffington gave to the Tesla Inc. TSLA, -8.93% chief executive in a blog post Friday. Huffington, a “huge admirer” of Musk and author of the 2016 book, “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time,” said his habit of overworking doesn’t help him or his company.
“Working 120-hour weeks doesn’t leverage your unique qualities, it wastes them. You can’t simply power through — that’s just not how our bodies and our brains work.” Ariana Huffington“The science is clear. And what it tells us is that there’s simply no way you can make good decisions and achieve your world-changing ambitions while running on empty,” she wrote.
The human body needs to recharge, Huffington said, and Tesla would benefit if Musk took the time to “refuel, recharge and reconnect.”
“You’re demonstrating a wildly outdated, anti-scientific and horribly inefficient way of using human energy,” she said. “It’s like trying to launch us into our clean energy future (or into space) with a coal-fired steam engine. It just won’t work.”
Read: 5 ways lack of sleep could alter the course of your life
Huffington, co-founded the Huffington Post and is an Uber Technologies Inc. board member, has a new startup, Thrive Global, which is focused on health and wellness.
Also see: Sleeping in at the weekend could add years to your life
On Thursday, the New York Times published an interview with Musk, who described an “excruciating” year that had seen him working 120-hour weeks and not leaving the Tesla factory for days at a time. The Times said Musk’s friends and Tesla’s board are concerned about his workload and the toll it’s taking on his health and well-being.
But in a tweet posted at 2:32 a.m. Sunday, Musk said he can’t afford to stop and catch a few Z’s. “Ford & Tesla are the only 2 American car companies to avoid bankruptcy. I just got home from the factory. You think this is an option. It is not,” he said in a reply to Huffington.
Tesla shares tumbled Friday after the Times interview was published, and are now down almost 2% this year. The stock has lost more than 20% of its value since Musk tweeted earlier this month that he was thinking about taking the company private. That tweet also triggered an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
