I would never want to work for an Elon, but I understand the allure. Like most of us, I'm giving a solid ~75% effort most days, just punching the clock. My work life balances is fine. I have time for my family and hobbies, etc. It's a nice, steady way to live. But every once in awhile, circumstances will conspire to provide me with hard work with an aggressive, drop-dead delivery date. It makes me mad at first--there are things I'd rather do than work, after all--but there is something to be said for letting go and locking the fuck in for a week of 14 hour a days. It feels good. It doesn't feel like work. It's a drug. It keeps me high until midnight, but makes me sleep like a rock. It makes me sleep like a rock, but has me springing out of bed 5 hours later! I feel like I'm the master of the universe. I'm impervious to stress. Even that's not quite right. It's not just that I'm immune to stress, it's that I start to feed off of it. I welcome it.

And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work.

I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines.

This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing.

tl;dr: It's a feature, not a bug.