As businesses around the world embrace a four-day week and “the right to disconnect”, Lisa Su, the CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), goes against the grain and asks some staff to show up on Saturdays.
When the 56-year-old took AMD’s reins in 2014, it was far from the $322 billion company it is today. At the time, its stock was trading around $3 per share and, according to Time, the indebted firm had just resorted to cutting about 25% of its staff and selling its Austin office.
But under Su’s helm, the company has become one of the world’s top chipmakers, competing with the likes of Intel and Nvidia. Its stock has surged to around $200 per share, and her net worth has ballooned along with it—the rise pushed Su into Forbes’ billionaire list for the first time in 2024.
That turnaround didn’t come without sacrifice. And Su makes no secret of that.
As confirmed to Fortune, the CEO even holds weekend meetings with her senior team.
“People are really motivated by ambitious goals,” the Fortune 500 boss previously told Time. “The previous strategy of, hey, let’s just do a little bit better here and there—that’s actually less motivational.”
“I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she added, before reportingly heading into a strategy meeting and urging her executives “to move faster and delegate more.”
The profile also suggested Su calls managers in the morning to discuss memos she sent them after midnight, however, an AMD spokesperson told Fortune “the specific anecdote was related to a pre-read that was distributed to her very late the evening prior for an early morning meeting.”
“Lisa provided feedback on which specific parts of the lengthy slide presentation the team should focus on in order to have a productive discussion,” the spokesperson added.
After-hours work: encouraged by some CEOs, despised by Gen Z and millennials
Of course, Su is not the only CEO who contacts staff in the evenings or weekends.
Daksh Gupta, the 23-year-old at the helm of AI software startup Greptile has made it crystal clear that work-life balance is a myth at his company—so clear, in fact, that he’s spelled it out in an online job description.
“Recently I started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9 a.m. and end at 11 p.m., often later, and we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays,” Gupta wrote on X. “I emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work.”
“We work extremely long hours because we’re trying to outwork our competition,” he told Fortune.
And then there’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is perhaps the loudest proponent of burning the midnight oil. After taking over Twitter, now X, he emailed his new employees (in the middle of the night, no less) demanding they work “long hours at high intensity.”
Soon after, he praised Shanghai employees for meeting him near midnight while blasting the U.S. “laptop class” for working from home. Of course, he’s no stranger himself to sleeping overnight at the Tesla factory.
However, it’s well known that for young workers today, having a life outside of work is just as important (if not more so) as building a career.
Research has consistently shown that this generation will turn down offers from employers who don’t align with their values and walk out of jobs that don’t grant them the flexibility they desire. They would even rather work multiple jobs than one with traditional rigid hours, to better accommodate their out-of-work passions.
Before shooting out a meeting invite to staff on a Saturday, bosses beware: 1 in 4 millennial workers would quit their jobs over a single out-of-hours demand from their boss.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on December 17, 2024.
More on work-life balance:
- Billionaire bosses like Jeff Bezos and Reid Hoffman denounce work-life balance—and some think working nonstop is key to success
- Hoping AI will give you more work-life balance in 2026? Fortune 500 CEOs warn otherwise
- Work-life balance finally outranks pay as a top motivator for job seekers, but CEOs aren’t sold
