Don’t You Dare Call Me Without Texting First
‘Extremely annoyed.’ The etiquette of unexpected phone calls divides friends, families and co-workers.
4 min
For some people, there is nothing more delightful than the surprise ringing of a phone that signals someone is thinking about them. For others, there is nothing ruder, more intrusive or panic-inducing than an unannounced call. You are out of your mind—and possibly not in their life—if you’re not sending them a text first.
Phone-call etiquette has never been more complicated. Family members, co-workers, spouses and friends can’t agree on whether it’s OK to call someone without first alerting them via text that you plan to call.
The debate is intensifying: the more entrenched texting has become, the more people have come to find a phone call without warning unacceptable. Those who call without warning, in turn, find the phone-call-phobic rigid to the point of absurdity: calls aren’t “unannounced”—the ringing is the announcement, with more than 100 years of precedent.
“I just don’t think calling is that big of a deal,” says Aparna Paul, 41, of North Easton, Mass., director of communications for a nonprofit.
She frequently calls friends and family out of the blue. Once when she needed to get a work task done that required contacting a colleague, she dialed him up without texting or emailing first.
“The co-worker was very annoyed that I called him,” she says. “Extremely annoyed.”
Paul is flummoxed by the shift toward some unwritten rule that a phone call must be a planned event: “To me it’s a little bit narcissistic to think your time is so important that I have to pencil myself into your schedule for a two-minute call.”
Expectations for communicating by phone tend to fall along generational lines, though outliers exist. Those who grew up with landlines and can remember having to pick up a phone to know who was on the other end often aren’t as perturbed by an unannounced call. People who’ve been texting away on cellphones since high school expect a heads up.
Preference for text messaging is highest among those aged 18 to 24, followed by those 25 to 34, according to a December survey from YouGov. Among 2,000 white-collar professionals surveyed by recruiting firm Robert Walters in March, just 16% of those who are Gen Z—those born between 1997 to 2012—thought the phone was a productive form of professional communication.
Merci Grace, 39, an investor in San Francisco, finds unannounced calls intrusive. She would just as soon not receive unscheduled calls—or calls of any kind—unless there is a specific reason.
Her husband finds specific reasons to call her all the time.
While she was in Fresno with her sisters recently, he called twice in quick succession: the first to tell her something the dogs had done. The second call prompted concern from one sister.
“I had to tell her, ‘Oh, he’s Gen X, he just calls me when he absolutely could have and should have texted me,’” says Grace. “I have found it’s healthy for my marriage to not try to change his behaviour.”
Yanda Erlich, Grace’s husband, considers phone calls among his love languages.
“I like hearing her voice,” says Elrich, 46, chief revenue officer of an AI startup. “I like her.”
Diana Fox, 38, of Miami Beach, Fla., finds calling more efficient than texting and then sitting around waiting to schedule the call. As the founder of Odyssey Gaming, which makes online games, her work is often time-sensitive. She doesn’t buy the argument that calls are intrusive and has found herself explaining to business partners that there’s a decline button they’re welcome to use.
“The person doesn’t have to pick up the call,” she says.
Whether it’s socially acceptable to still be calling people without texting remains an open question for descendants of etiquette guru Emily Post.
“I don’t think we’re going to land on one side of this issue or the other,” says Daniel Post Senning, a spokesperson for the Emily Post Institute. (Emily was his great-great-grandmother.)
Factors that must be considered include the relationship you have with the person and whether they have expressed a preference about how to communicate, he says. Senning is OK with friends and family calling him without texting first but not strangers.
“If I were to ask the world a favour, I would ask people that have never communicated with me, if they got access to it, not to use that direct number,” he says.
Stevie Steinberg, 24, an electrical engineer in San Francisco, doesn’t have an issue with unexpected calls because no one in his life would ever call him unless a call was agreed upon over text first. This includes his parents, brother and friends. The exception is if while making plans there have been so many texts that it’s faster to get on the phone; even then there’s an understanding that a call might be coming.
The three times Steinberg can think of when he received calls without first being notified by text, someone had died. He now associates unplanned calls with emergencies and generally bad things.
“If I was driving and I got a call from, I don’t know, someone who lives near me maybe, I’d think my apartment was on fire,” he says.
Vanessa Lincoln, 24, often calls friends without texting first. She’s especially partial to a surprise FaceTime.
“A lot of people in my generation have phone anxiety. They get freaked out by the idea of answering the phone,” says Lincoln, who lives in New York City and works at a consulting firm. “I’ve never been like that.”
Sometimes when Lincoln and her parents, in Washington state, are done talking over FaceTime, they stay on the call—spending time together, cooking or doing things around the house.
“I kind of like FaceTime because you don’t have to be talking,” says Lincoln. “You can kind of just hang out… I don’t know if that is a normal thing to do.”
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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