‘Knife-at-your-throat feeling’: How Elon Musk is shaking up Washington

The email landed in employees’ inboxes with this subject line: “Fork in the Road.” The message in the email was stark: Accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign.

That was the note that millions of federal employees received around 5pm on Tuesday in the US. It echoed a similar message that thousands of workers at Twitter got from Elon Musk in late 2022 after he bought the company.

Elon Musk is returning to a familiar playbook with his new role in Washington. Credit: AP

Musk has brought his takeover tactics from Twitter to the federal government, where he’s become a close adviser to President Donald Trump and is running the cost-cutting project called the Department of Government Efficiency. The administration is already eliminating diversity initiatives, testing engineering prowess and demanding federal employee loyalty, manoeuvres Musk embraced to slash his social media company’s budget and operations.

The Tuesday email, sent by the Office of Personnel Management, was the latest example of the billionaire’s fingerprints, down to the subject line – the same as his 2022 buyout offer to Twitter employees.

“It’s a knife-at-your-throat feeling,” said Rumman Chowdhury, a former Twitter executive who left the company, now known as X, after Musk’s takeover. “The uncertainty is wild.”

Musk and a spokesperson for DOGE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk has previously said he expects to slash $US2 trillion from the federal budget. Between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of federal workers were expected to accept the exit packages offered, “which could lead to around $US100 billion in savings,” Musk’s political action committee, America PAC, said in a post on X.

Musk, who also leads Tesla and SpaceX, has enlisted the help of a team of loyalists to assess agencies and make cuts, the same thing he did during the Twitter takeover.

Steve Davis, the head of Musk’s tunnelling startup, The Boring Co., helped oversee cost-cutting at Twitter and now leads DOGE. Brian Bjelde, a longtime human resources executive at SpaceX who also helped during the Twitter takeover, is now an adviser to the Office of Personnel Management.

Michael Grimes, a top banker at Morgan Stanley who helped lead Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce Department.

Musk completed a dramatic takeover of Twitter (now X) in 2022. Credit: Bloomberg

One of Musk’s software engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named the head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps manage federal agencies. Shedd promptly employed a Musk tactic: asking for proof of engineers’ technical chops.

Shedd asked engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share “a recent individual technical win,” according to an email sent to more than 700 employees Tuesday night and viewed by The New York Times.

“These sessions are an opportunity to understand more deeply the types of expertise we have,” Shedd said in his email, which emphasised his “hours on the factory floor” at Tesla.

Just a day after acquiring Twitter, Musk demanded engineers print out and share code they had written for the company’s various products.

Musk also worked quickly to undo diversity initiatives at the social media company – a move echoed by Trump’s flurry of executive orders in his first week in office, which eliminated diversity and inclusion efforts in the federal government.

“These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” according to emails sent to federal workers viewed by the Times.

After buying Twitter, Musk slammed previous management’s attempts to foster diversity, sharing a video in which he mocked shirts made for the company’s Black employee group. Under his leadership, the company cut funding for employee resource groups and took down a mural celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement in its San Francisco office, according to two former employees.

One of Musk’s go-to tactics for cutting costs at Twitter was reducing the company’s real estate footprint. He stopped paying rent for various office spaces around the world, leading to evictions from several facilities, including in Seattle and Boulder, Colorado.

The General Services Administration is also targeting real estate for cost-cutting. Stephen Ehikian, a former tech executive and Trump appointee, told workers in an email sent Tuesday and viewed by the Times that two of the agency’s properties would be listed for sale while three leases had been terminated. The move would save about $US11 million and was a “first step” in slashing real estate expenditures, according to the email.

While Musk ultimately transformed Twitter, reducing staff by 80 per cent and minimising its real estate footprint, its business has declined. Advertisers have fled the site in droves, and at least one investor, Fidelity, estimates the company is now worth 72 per cent less than the $US44 billion he paid for it.

“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive and we’re barely breaking even,” Musk wrote in an email to X employees earlier this month, which was viewed by the Times and previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. “We need to be faster, more innovative and relentlessly focused.”

‘Elon clearly thinks he learned from Twitter how to decimate a workplace and he’s trying to roll out the same playbook with the federal government now.’

Employment lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan.

Musk resurfaced one of his 2024 posts Tuesday evening on X, appearing to reference the “fork in the road” email to federal employees, which demanded that they be “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” and “strive for excellence”.

Some government workers are looking to former Twitter employees for guidance.

Several federal employees circulated online posts from Chowdhury offering advice about how to respond to a Musk takeover. Others contacted Shannon Liss-Riordan, an employment lawyer who is suing Musk on behalf of former Twitter workers.

“Elon clearly thinks he learned from Twitter how to decimate a workplace and he’s trying to roll out the same playbook with the federal government now,” Liss-Riordan said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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