From the email you can quickly work out that he intends this to apply to everyone. He would not ask for exceptions to be routed to him if he meant this just to apply to his direct staff.
The rest have to support, manage, or otherwise interact with the people who need to physically be there, and the most efficient way to do that is if they are also there.
Just like Amazon, most of the employees work in Whole Foods or fulfillment centers. But the professional staff in software engineering etc don’t have to be in the office to do their work. Even if their software impacts the fulfillment center they likely have never set foot in one.
If there's an issue with your design and you need to rearrange it to accommodate some production limitation, do you think it might be helpful to be able to walk down to the factory floor and look at it first hand?
There's tons of companies where you can do all the work remotely. If that's a high priority, don't work at Tesla. When you need to make physical products, it's helpful to be at the place where the physical product are being made, because they don't just exist entirely in your code editor.
If people really want to work for any company non-remote, then they will. That doesn't mean that banning remote work is popular or necessary.
Even as close to something like working on the UI for a vehicle -- I would assume they have the ability to run that in an emulator, in a desktop test bed, or even as a developer build in their personal car. And it's going to faster for most work to work that way (perhaps other than integration with a new model).
Also, I don't think most people are saying "never" with respect to going into the office. It's Tesla's CEO that's saying "never" to remote work.
Lots of things were done sub-optimally during the pandemic due to the circumstances. That doesn't mean we shouldn't go back to doing them a way that works better now that we can.
That things weren't worse is a sign that the world adapted to the new working situation very effectively.
A lot of things were doable during pandemic time because it was global, temporary and necessary. Eg: lots of people got their salaries maintained despite their job not really existing anymore. That was possible (and necessary) because we knew it was temporary. But the conclusion cannot be "As the pandemic showed us a lot of the workforce can be paid even if they don't produce anything, we should stop asking people to work at all".
Similarly, while some level of operations were able to be maintained during the pandemic, the rate of innovation and the global productivity definitely went down, significantly. If you intent to be maintaining the same working conditions, with the same effects in a post COVID world while your competition resumes regular operations, going back to regular speed, you are going to have a hard time.
Somewhere along the line, goalposts were shifted. At the beginning, the concern was about Elon saying "everyone has to be in the office all the time". Now somehow we're at the point of a false dichotomy between "always on site" and "never on site". For most people, remote work is a healthy minimum. Most of my colleagues are at home 3-4 days a week and in the office 1-2 days a week. That saves them the commute most of the time, but we still get collaborative tasks done when we meet in the office.
I imagine it could be similar for industrial designers: When they are interacting with their CAD programs, there is no need to "go down to the production line to see how their design worked out" right away. That can happen whenever they're at the factory the next time, which may be a few days or a few weeks out.
I've worked for a retail company where we made physical kiosks for stores - no one ever went into the stores to debug anything, we just worked on simulators and a couple of example units in head office.
Exactly the same philosophy applies at Tesla.
Whatever it is that Elon does it works for his companies.
If you don't want the expectation to give 110% of what you can, don't work for Elon companies.
You can argue that factory workers don't have choice what job their are doing, so they need checks and balances.
But people who could work remotely certainly can change employer if they dislike Elon work ethics.
'If there are particularly exceptional contributors ... I will review and approve those exceptions directly'