Musk employee says ‘never felt more alive’ after 19-hour workday, sparks work-life balance debate—‘Until you burn out’

An xAI techie's 19-hour shift broke the Internet into a debate on work-life balance and how long hours of work are a “set recipe for burnout”. However, the techie, Giri Kuncoro, wasn't complaining.

In a post on X, Kuncoro shared that he had his longest workday at Elon Musk’s AI firm on Thursday. The techie was more than elated to put in those extra hours and said he "never felt more alive”.

“It’s 5:30 am. Just closed my laptop after 19 hours of work today—my longest at xAI so far. I’ve never felt more alive,” he wrote on X.

Kuncoro's dedicated hours served as a reminder of his boss, Musk's "extremely hardcore" approach to work. Musk is a believer of long work-hours, and had once famously said: “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”.

Here's how the netizens reacted:

The xAI techie was criticised on social media by users who questioned the health implications of such extreme hours, pointing out that working for nearly 20 hours “is not healthy”.

“This is not a flex, 8 hours of sleep and working out daily will make you more productive than this slop,” a user said.

Another added, “Not healthy, Giri! What did you break that forced you to stay on?”

“Man... hope you don't get burned out bang,” said another user.

One netizen said, “19 hours? Doc says 8 hours of sleep, not 8 hours less than Elon.”

“Until you burn out and require years of your life to rebuild your mental capacity and immune system,” another noted.

A user said Kuncoro was giving the “same vibe as the Cybertruck guy who left xAI after 2-3 months”

“Bro is running on cortisol and mission,” quipped another user.

However, a user said that xAI techie wasn't doing something out-of-the-box — “I worked 22 hours a day (1–2 hours of rough sleep) for 6 days per week (1 day rest per week), up to 11 weeks. What are you yelling about?” said the user.

Who is Giri Kuncoro?

Giri Kuncoro is a software engineer, working on xAI, according to his personal website. He said the focus of his work is cloud native infrastructure for AI workloads and LLM serving.

Previously, Kuncoro worked at TikTok, Gojek, and VMware. “I'm also a former CNCF ambassador, I founded the Kubernetes community in Indonesia and led the SIG Docs localisation group,” he said.

Kuncoro, currently living in London, shared that he had lived and worked in Tokyo, Palo Alto, Jakarta, Bangalore, and Sydney in the past. “I enjoy sharing insights from my work at conferences.”