CEO Work-Life Balance: How Business Leaders Feel About It

On a recent episode of “The Playbook,” a video series from Sports Illustrated and Entrepreneur, billionaire entrepreneur and former “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban said, “There is no balance” for the most ambitious people.

“People are like, ‘I need a work-life balance,'” he said. “If you want to work 9-to-5, you can have work-life balance. If you want to crush the game, whatever game you’re in, there’s somebody working 24 hours a day to kick your ass.”

Billionaire investor and hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman said in a recent interview with Business Insider that there’s more to life than hustling.

“I’ve been married 61 years to the same woman,” he said, adding that his greatest success in life is that “my kids still come home.”

“Love what you do — it’s too demanding and difficult not to,” the Wall Street veteran said. “Pursue it with a passion,” he continued. Cooperman said that while he spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs, it never felt like work because he enjoyed it so much.

In 2018, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said that workers should aim for work-life harmony, not “balance,” at an event hosted by Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer. Bezos also called the concept of work-life balance “debilitating” because it hints that there’s a trade-off.

Bezos said that it’s not a work-life balance, but “it’s actually a circle.”

Bezos said that if he feels happy at home, then it energizes him and makes him more productive at work, and vice versa.

Microsoft’s CEO also thinks that “work-life balance” isn’t the goal. Instead, he says to focus on work-life “harmony.” In 2019, he shared his thoughts with the Australian Financial Review, saying he used to think that he needed to balance relaxing and working. But he’s since shifted his approach, aligning his “deep interests” with his work.

“Work-life balance is a lie,” TIAA CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett said in a 2023 fireside chat. Brown Duckett has previously said she used to struggle with guilt and balancing her demanding job with being a mother.

Brown Duckett says that she views her life as a “portfolio,” and that she takes time to perform different roles like mother, wife, and business executive. Though she may not always physically be with her children, she says she strives to be fully present during the time she is able to spend with them.

Arianna Huffington, founder of Thrive Global and HuffPost, told Great Place to Work that we shouldn’t view productivity and relaxation as two opposing forces. Huffington said that when one area of your life improves, the other does as well.

Huffington said employees should focus more on “work-life integration” since “we bring our entire selves to work.”

Still, Huffington believes that your personal life should always come first.

“While work is obviously important and can give us purpose and meaning in our lives, it shouldn’t take the place of life,” she said. “Work is a part of a thriving life, but life should come first.”

Elon Musk is a known workaholic, and he expects those who work beneath him to be as well.

In 2022, just after Musk took ownership of X, formerly Twitter, he sent out an email to employees telling them to either dedicate their lives to working or leave the company. Musk reportedly made X employees work 84 hours a week. While some people think remote work improved their work-life balance, Musk has often criticized it and called it “morally wrong.”

According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of him, Musk would stay at the office overnight and shower at the YMCA when he joined the workforce in 1995. Musk has continued the habit while working at Tesla and buying Twitter, often spending the night at work.

In 2018, Musk said that he works 120 hours a week, amounting to 17 hours a day.

One of China’s richest men, Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma in 2019 expressed his support for the controversial “996” work system in many Chinese workplaces, which refers to working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. He’s called “996” culture a “huge blessing” for younger workers.

“Many companies and many people don’t have the opportunity to work 996,” he said in 2019. “If you don’t work 996 when you are young, when can you ever work 996?”

“If you find a job you like, the 996 problem does not exist,” he added. “If you’re not passionate about it, every minute of going to work is a torment.”

China’s government called the grueling 996 schedule “illegal” in 2021, though it’s believed to continue to be an expectation at many Chinese companies.