US stopped being a nation of workaholics. Enter Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has proved visionary in defying conventional wisdom. When others said electric cars were the technology of the future, he made them a profitable venture in the present. When others claimed private space travel was a niche, he created an industry that looks as if it could boom in the next few years.

But when last week he gave Twitter employees an ultimatum – become “hardcore” workers or quit – he sounded to many like a throwback. In the United States and many nations in the West, post-pandemic workers appear to be looking for balance and flexibility rather than long hours at the office.

It’s a vision “almost like the 1930s,” says Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, “that people work as hard as he tells them to because they haven’t got any alternatives. But clearly right now, they’ve got lots of alternatives.”

By Thursday, hundreds of remaining employees quit. (Mr. Musk had already laid off or fired about half of Twitter’s employees.) The chaos was so great that the company denied all workers badge access to its buildings, asking them to work from home temporarily. Then, Mr. Musk called an in-person meeting for Friday at 2 p.m. for “anyone who can write code.”