Tesla CEO Elon Musk Says 'Vacations Will Kill You', Shares Bad Vacation Experiences

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hailed as an innovator inspiring technocrat has sprung a surprise saying “vacations will kill you.”

Musk’s comments go against the trend of CEOs holidaying and flying out for vacations citing work pressure to relax at cool hill stations, exotic resorts, entertainment centers or gallivanting in the cool beach of Destin Florida.

Musk who started launching companies in the early 1990s became a dotcom millionaire in 1999 and is known for his penchant for hard work. He sold Zip2 for $300 million to Compaq.

He has not looked back since then. Musk later launched X.com, that became PayPal and was bought over by eBay for $1.5 billion.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and it was followed by Tesla in 2003. These are great success stories of Musk and stand out for his readiness to go to any length in terms of hard grind to realize big goals.

On the aversion to indulge in vacations, Musk says he loves spending time working and hitting targets. Musk said on "Recode Decode" that he needs an average of 100 hours a week to do justice to his start-ups. Despite his growth and billionaire status that has not changed.

Workaholic CEO

In 2018, reports said Musk used to sleep on the Tesla factory floor to catch up production on the Model 3 cars. “I don’t have time to go home and shower,” he told Gayle King on “CBS This Morning.”

Musk has said he tried to go on vacation twice in more than a decade and both times he landed up in problematic situations, per Tesla news.

“The first time I took a week off, the Orbital Sciences rocket exploded and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket exploded in that same week.

Musk tried an adult vacation as a honeymoon trip with first wife Justine in September 2000. But that ended up in bad professional news.

During the X.com days when Musk was flying with Justine, executives delivered a letter of no-confidence to the company’s board, replacing Musk with Peter Thiel as CEO.

That made him fly back to Palo Alto in California hours after reaching Sydney, Australia for the honeymoon, per book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” by Ashlee Vance.

When Musk and Justine decided to go on honeymoon again that December to Brazil and South Africa. But Musk contracted malaria in South Africa and “came very close to dying” and recovered barely.

“That’s my lesson for taking a vacation,” Musk said in the book. “Vacations will kill you.”

Musk quits presence on Twitter

Musk’s comment is relevant when the year-end travel boom is in sight and Christmas time is going to offer many vacations to go. The season’s high demand for vacation travel is apparent from the news about the surging deals at Apple vacations, Lastminute, eDreams, Costco Travel, and Opodo surge.

Meanwhile, last week Elon Musk declared he is quitting twitter in favor of popular news and discussion platform at Reddit.

The entrepreneur’s tweets, liked by millions also landed Musk in trouble including those comments to which the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) objected saying they were aimed at misleading investors.

“Not sure about the good of Twitter,” Musk told his 29 million followers adding he is going offline and “Reddit still seems good.”