Elon Musk admits email to government workers was a ruse
Elon Musk admits email to government workers was a ruse
Department of Government Efficiency head says he wants to test whether federal employees are ‘capable of replying to an email’
Summary
Elon Musk admitted that his mass email to federal employees demanding weekly accomplishment reports sent to him or risk termination was a test to gauge responsiveness.
Musk tried to frame the move as a “pulse check” on bureaucrats.
The email caused confusion, with some agency leaders advising staff to ignore it, while others initially instructed compliance before reversing course.
A rift emerged as top officials at the FBI, Pentagon, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Energy openly defied Musk’s directive, highlighting tensions within the administration.
Sounds like bullshit. I’d say he was totally serious and then is now, after it mostly fizzles, is giving the suitty excuse because he’s a childish and weasely coward.
Let’s assume, on average, every Government worker spent only 10 minutes reviewing, talking about, determining the legitimacy of, and figuring out the correct course of action for this email. Musk’s stupidity cost taxpayers 333,333 hours in wasted time.
That’s only for 10 minutes.
federal workers are terrified right now that if they make one wrong step, they'll be on their asses, with families and mortgages depending on them to be perfect.
this email alone resulted in thousands of unplanned mandatory meetings with supervisors, checking with coworkers, asking PR and internal communications experts, consulting with division directors, on and on up the chain of command.
trust me, they spent way more than 10 minutes, more like hours and hours per employee across the whole govt.
You just cannot understand the galaxy brain "efficiency" that fElon is blessing the world with here.
People would talk about Steve Jobs and his "reality distortion field", but I'm not sure he had anything on the levels of bullshit that fElon and those around him can be convinced of. It's probably due to money.
"Efficiency" is just a word they throw in to distract. None of this is about efficiency, and everything they're doing is the opposite of efficient.
It's just the bad new manager who wants to "shake things up" to make their mark, without first bothering to understand how anything works. Going through life with no clue but a baseless assumption that they always know better. Except this is across the whole federal government and the new manager is a Nazi.
they were getting pushback from their own 'people' heading some of the agencies and departments. they had to walk the email back or risk actually losing one or more of them to sanity.
It didn't play out how he wanted it to, and people were pushing back and talking about it being very illegal, people that matter. So, of course, it was a joke all along. "Man, you guys thought I was serious? Could you imagine? You guys really need to lighten up and take a joke better. So serious..."
We've all been on the other end of that from the various douchebags in our lives.
Also "ha, you flinched!" They like when people react like that.
Ha Ha, just joking!
Because he faces a massive lawsuit.
The asshole should be in prison for life for breaking into our government systems and our institutions.
Given that he's filthy rich, I just know it won't happen, but it really should. And ALL of his companies and assets seized. Maybe some set aside for baby mamas and children, but the rest should be handed over to the government, since all of it is built on the back of the government anyway.
Nah, I definitely think it was a ruse, just not this one. What the fuck were they ever gonna DO with 3 million e-mails coming in within a week? Actually analyze them all to idendify each employee's value? Nonsense.
A) It was a cheap way to bank an excuse to fire anyone who didn't respond "for cause" at some later point when they identify people they want to fire, and are looking for cause.
B) They were planning to feed all the responses into an LLM or something similar. Maybe as a way to look for certain "woke" buzzwords and make a hitlist of people to target for firing.
Reconnaissance-in-force
Haha, it was a prank bro! A social experiment bro! Totally for real bro, I was just testing you bro! Bro!
"It's just an A/B test, bro".
P.S. I fucking HATE that I have to hear this kind of bullshit corporate-speak all the time at work, by the way...the terminology is almost always used incorrectly as an added bonus.
I don't know if fElon's style of speaking grates on me so much because he's picked up just so much of this same HiveMind bullshit pseudo-techno jargon, or because so many others hear people like him and think, "oh, he has money, he must be smart and important, so I should parrot that like a brainless dumbass and hope others think I'm a sooper dooper genius, too", and therefore, I hear so many other idiots spouting this same kind of shit like they are the stupidest parody of a corporate drone from a show like Silicon Valley...
Anyway, I'm quite sick of it, regardless of the cause, and when I see fElon going off and saying the same vapid shit passed off as Great Pearls Of Techbro Wisdom that I hear at work, I think part of my brain breaks.
No it wasn't. It's typical bully tactics when they're pushed back. "I was just kidding bro, settle down".
Wow. How efficient.
Send this illegal idiot immigrant back to South Africa. His brain is rotten.
Wasting everyone’s time and money.
That has real " it's just a prank bro" energy
I dont see anything in the article that indicates that's what he meant. Or that he "admitted" it was a "ruse".
He seems to be saying specifically that it was real and intentional and was planned to be used. He is just saying that he wanted to get a list of which people did/didn't respond. What he planned to do with it is still a mystery, but using lack of response as justification to fire people seems like one good bet.
As a federal contractor I will no longer accept new work under our current presidental admin. I will instead go back to work on temp private sector contracts. This is my protest.
No shame in everybody who has to keep working for the federal government - everyone’s gotta feed their family first .
I don't think this is the way. Take their money and do the bare minimum. Malicious compliance that causes issues is a good way to get the public outraged enough that something changes.
I dunno, it almost seems like good business sense to be wary of taking federal contracts right now. They are canceling them arbitrarily, so why take that chance?
"admits" it was a ruse? No, it wasn't. He tried the same shit he pulled at Twitter and when it backfired, he made up a story about it just being a ruse. God, I hate it when the media enables the rewriting of history the new oligarch overlords feed them with.
Anyone who works directly for a Musk company should quietly start looking for another job.
People in unions should strike right now. People who aren't in unions should also strike, but I don't expect miracles.
This is the biggest asshole boss indicator. There should never be a situation where someone in power "jokes" about firing.
He needs a very quick financial lesson in not fucking with his employees. One week of work stoppage across every company he owns should do it.
Sounds like a great “pulse check” for Musk!
Nobody replies back to his power move, his reaction: "LoL joke". Literally a man with the mental age of a ten year old is running the show.
- Massively overreach
- Play it off as a super sick big-brain move
- Rinse
- Repeat
Musk is just another pathological liar. The goons herd together.
When your girlfriend has one of her friends come on to you "as a test," you kick her to the fucking curb.
Men do this, too, and it's super rare for either gender to do it. We don't need to play to stereotypes.
I'm not seeing the part where I said "Men never do this."
Oh, that's because I didn't say that.
admitsClaims
Shitty, apologist headline.
If anyone else acted to disrupt federal functionality like that they'd be in prison for treason.
Nobody elected this chucklefuck, he is actively harmful to the country and doing irreparable damage. Of all the people getting deported this fucker is the one that really deserves it.
Schrodinger's dumbass over here.
Tries a thing, thing fails/is ridiculed, "ha ha! Thing wasn't actually this, but that instead!"
"It was just a prank bro"
Are you FUCKING kidding me is this actually his excuse?
The main takeaway from this should be: his power is not unlimited.
It was just a joke, guys! Totally not prodding with what we can and can't get away with!
It took a lot of time for many in our agency leadership to deal with this shit - I received 4 emails total about it from my supervisor and up the chain from there.
These folks are busy - they have shit to do. I’m busy - I have shit to do. We were told not to respond so we didn’t. Fuck Space Karen.
this is like a child saying something bad then trying to play it off as a joke when it's not received well
why are you silent on your “king” being a pathetic coward? you’re happy wasting money on this clown?
Is it even remotely legal to say "innocuous ordinary action like missing an email will be interpreted as a resignation"?
Imagine a manager starting a meeting with "we need to cut some staff, so blinking will be interpreted as a resignation"
Stunts like this are going to cause everyone to join a union just so they can make their rep deal with this sort of bullshit instead.
Most of America is "at will", so yes you can fire people for blinking. It gets more complicated with unions and companies internal policies, and you'd still need to pay severance.
But basically you can always do a musk. Pretend the firing was a resignation and let it drag slowly through the courts, and refuse to settle.
Guy needs a heavy dose of fentanyl.
It was totally just a test the whole time guys! The lawsuit is just a weird coincidence
Trump and Musk use the same "test the waters" sandbox tactics. They're toddlers in charge of a country
Right. So, what did they actually do while everyone was fixated on this?
The opposition party is the media," former Trump White House political strategist Steve Bannon told PBS' Frontline back in 2019, during Trump's first term in office. "And the media can only — because they're dumb and they're lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time."
"And all we have to do is flood the zone," Bannon said. "Every day we hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done."
Just a prank bruh.
Sounds like someone who got called on their bluff.
Prank!
The state of journalism .
Bureaucracy to pulse check bureaucracy. Sure.