- Elon Musk says DOGE employees are working 120 hours a week. With only 168 hours in a week, that means workers would have no more than 6.8 hours of sleep each night, even in the most ideal conditions. Research warns against working more than 55 hours per week and sleeping for less than seven hours of sleep each night.
Back in February, Elon Musk said he and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are working 120 hours a week.
“Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week,” he added. “That is why they are losing so fast.”
To be clear, there are 168 hours in a week, which means if Musk and his DOGE employees are working for 120 of those hours, there are only 48 hours remaining for them to use for everything else: preparing and eating food, personal hygiene, not to mention free time for hobbies or spending time with their families.
Just for fun, let’s assume you need to spend 120 of your 168 hours per week working, so you use the remaining 48 hours for sleep and sleep only: You still wouldn’t come close to a full eight hours per night, which is what many doctors recommend. With 48 hours of potential sleep spread across seven days, even in the most ideal conditions, the most you could get is 6.8 hours per night. Assuming DOGE workers are not working from home (Musk called remote work “morally wrong” in 2023), it’s safe to say DOGE employees working 120-hour weeks would probably not even scratch 6.8 hours of sleep since they’d need time to commute, unless they’re squeezing in nap breaks during the day.
To be totally clear, sleep is vital to function. The Mayo Clinic says regularly getting less than seven hours of sleep a night for adults “has been linked with poor health, including weight gain, having a body mass index of 30 or higher, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and depression.” The CDC also says getting less than seven hours of sleep on a regular basis “can lead to serious health problems.”
Musk, though, is famously a workaholic. In a November 2022 interview with Baron Capital CEO Ron Baron, the world’s richest man said he was “living in the factory in Fremont, and the one in Nevada, for three years straight. That was my primary residence.
“I slept on the couch at one point, in a tent on the roof, and for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory,” he said. “It was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor and always, when I woke up, I’d smell like metal dust.”
Musk’s push to make employees more effective by simply having them log more hours may not yield good results either. A 2014 study from Stanford University found productivity per hour has a sharp drop-off when a person works more than 50 hours a week, and “output at 70 hours differs little from output at 56 hours,” meaning your efficacy has diminishing returns above a certain threshold. Perhaps relatedly, Musk recently said he’s juggling his responsibilities with DOGE, Tesla, and his other private companies like SpaceX and xAI “with great difficulty.”
Working 55 hours a week or more seems to have equal ramifications for both productivity and well-being: According to 2021 data from the World Health Organization, 745,000 people died in 2016 from either stroke or heart disease “as a result of having worked at least 55 hours a week.” That same study said working more than 55 hours a week gives you a 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease compared to a traditional 35- to 40-hour week.
“Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” Dr. Maria Neira, who has served as the WHO’s director of the department of public health and environment since 2005, said in a statement.
Musk and his DOGE team did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
