Musk says Americans avoid working unlike Chinese!

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, predicted that China would produce successful electric vehicle makers due to strong business ethics, a trait he sees as lacking in the United States.

Musk said Tuesday in an interview with the Financial Times: "I think there will be some very strong companies coming from China. There are a lot of super talented people who work hard in China and believe strongly in manufacturing ".

Musk, who ranks as the world's richest person with a wealth estimated by Forbes at more than $225 billion, compared Chinese manufacturing workers with counterparts in the United States: "They're not leaving the factory, whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all."

• Tesla reportedly used certain working practices at its Shanghai plant that clearly could not or would not be attempted in the United States. For example

• Bloomberg reported last month that after the end of a three-week lockdown, workers at the factory were told to sleep and eat on the factory floor. 

• Each staff member received a sleeping bag and an air mattress and was required to work 12 hours' shifts, six days a week.

The National Labour Relations Council in Washington ruled last year that Tesla had questioned workers illegally and threatened them about their efforts to form a union. 

The company also faces an employee's lawsuit for allegedly creating a racist culture. Other workers accused Musk of being excessive.

However, South African-born Musk himself claims he never walked away from his heavy workload, telling Bloomberg in 2018 that the more his staff felt pain, "I wanted to be worse." He was best known for sleeping on the factory floor when Tesla was racing to meet the production targets of one of its electric vehicles in 2018.

1. US work ethic appears to have deteriorated since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. 4.54 million US workers resigned from their jobs in March
2. up 23% from the previous year, leaving employers struggling to fill an unprecedented abundance of vacancies.
3.  In many cases, employees resigned instead of returning to the office after companies terminated remote work policies developed during the pandemic

. U.S. workers' productivity fell 7.5% from a year earlier in the first three months of 2022, the largest decline since 1947. At the same time, unit labor costs jumped by about 12%, meaning employers were paying much more to get much less.