| Hey y'all, it's Austin Carr in Boston. Elon Musk needs to invent a time machine to manage his workload. But first… Today's must-reads: • Amazon shrank by 100,000 workers
• China asked TikTok for a stealth propaganda account
• Twitter v. Elon Musk will go to trial in October Where does Elon Musk find the time? Between his chief executive roles at Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, commitments to tunneling projects and neurotechnology and lawsuit with Twitter, it's hard to imagine how his schedule has room for raising a big family and repopulating the world, saving free speech, constantly posting memes, making supposedly serious investments in crypto and yachting off the coast of Greece. "I work crazy hours," Musk tweeted recently. "There just isn't much time for shenanigans." In the tech world, famed founder-CEOs are revered for this sort of doggedness. They apparently got to where they are because they work harder and longer than everyone else, an email-through-the-night inexhaustibility that is infused with the mystique of tech's superwealthy. Such mythmaking usually involves bending the truth to gussy up a corporate narrative or startup story. In Musk's case, it's often about bending time. "Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week," he has said. Tales of Musk's 'round-the-clock work ethic have long colored his Iron Man reputation. At his first company, Zip2, Musk said he had to code all night. "Seven days a week, all the time." After getting pushed out of his role at PayPal while traveling, he has tried to avoid vacations. During a period of car production "hell," Musk said he was sleeping at one of Tesla's factories. So dedicated is he to SpaceX's mission, Musk has said his primary home is a modest $50,000 house near the company's Texas spaceport. It's hard to tell how much of this Spartan lifestyle is real. For one, court documents—related to having twins with a Neuralink Corp. executive—listed his address at a multimillion-dollar house in Austin, suggesting he's not quite living 24/7 engulfed in SpaceX's operations. With all his corporate responsibilities, he's also found time to date Grimes and Amber Heard, father a bunch of children, attend celebrity galas, play notoriously time-consuming video games like Elden Ring and tweet prolifically. (Musk has clarified he mostly tweets from the toilet, implying he's either a fast tweeter or may have a bowel issue.) To be sure, having a work-life balance is a healthy thing. But Musk has spent so long self-aggrandizing about his workload that the myth crumbles with any glimpse into his actual life. The dynamic has led to funny results. In denying a recent report that he had had an affair with the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Musk said both that the allegations couldn't possibly be true because he works too much—and because he's still close with Brin, noting that they were partying the night before. Musk has good reason to keep the narrative alive that his work is his life. It cements his superhero status among fanboys, certainly, but it's also necessary to assure investors that he still has bandwidth for delivering earnings for Tesla and fulfilling government contracts for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. As Tesla's stock approaches a three-month high, shareholders appear to be satisfied with Musk's version of events. —Austin Carr China is investigating key figures who shaped computer chip policies as the US pursues its own law to help local companies catch up. The top anti-graft agency launched the probe last week. Tech megacap stocks are doing pretty well now. Alibaba faces a possible delisting in the US for not allowing the country's regulators to inspect financial audits. Metaverse jobs are disappearing. As tech companies slow hiring, new monthly job postings across all industries with "metaverse" in the title declined by 81% between April and June. Gen Z uses TikTok the way most people use Google. That change threatens to upend the internet's order. | 
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