Ruling by fear and cutting 80 per cent of the workforce: Musk’s public sector revolution

After fervently endorsing Donald Trump throughout the election campaign, the world’s richest man looks set for a role in the new government

In October 2022, as Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion (£34 billion), he posted a video of himself walking into the company’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying a white porcelain sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”, read the accompanying caption.
It was not a typical way for an industrialist to announce a multi-billion dollar acquisition. But Musk, the world’s richest man, who has built a fortune of over $250 billion through the electric vehicle company Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, has long had an eccentric public persona, in which humour makes up for a gravitas shortfall.
The sink post was an irreverent pun, but there was also a degree of warning; Twitter was his company now, and he would do with it as he pleased.
In the early hours of Wednesday, after America came to terms with the scale of Donald Trump’s election victory, Musk posted another picture of himself carrying a sink. This time the background, crudely photoshopped, was the Oval Office.
During the election campaign, Musk went to bat for Donald Trump with childlike enthusiasm. He did star jumps on stage, handed out daily million-dollar cheques to supporters of his pro-Trump America Political Action Committee (PAC), and in general threw every ounce of his weight behind his candidate.
“There is a long history of rich individuals playing in politics,” says Tim Higgins, author of Power Play: Elon Musk, Tesla and the Bet of the Century. “But it’s usually with their money behind the scenes. What Elon has been doing with his personality and the media attention he can generate is almost unprecedented. I’ve seen celebrities used to generate media attention, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to win – that’s obvious from Kamala Harris’s campaign.
“With his PAC, Musk was also using his fortune to try to convert excitement into voting. He was running a ground game in battleground states. That’s a level of sophistication you don’t often see from surrogates. He was all-in for Trump. Musk likes to say that if you’re going to play, you have to play to win. He was clearly playing to win here.”
After Trump’s sweeping victory, it appeared all but certain that there would be a role for Musk in government if he wanted it. He even made it into the latest family photo, holding his son X, alongside the extended Trumps.
On Tuesday, his task was made clear when the president-elect appointed Musk to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency – an acronym pun on “DOGE”, a meme and cryptocurrency – alongside fellow entrepreneur and Trump supporter Vivek Ramaswamy.
Musk said the move “will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people”.
Trump himself said in September that the newly-coined department would work to cut red tape and inefficiency. On Tuesday, he hailed it as “potentially the Manhattan Project of our time”, insisting DOGE would “drive large scale structural reform”, and create an “entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before”.
At Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in October, Musk said he thought $2 trillion could be saved from the government budget.
“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a fellow Trump adviser and billionaire, asked him.
“I think we can do at least $2 trillion,” Musk replied. “Your money is being wasted, and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that. We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.”
If Musk is truly planning to treat the government as he has treated his businesses, employees are in for quite a ride. If he is planning to do what he did at Twitter, they should be finding ways to look busy.
Musk’s career has been characterised by a ruthless war on waste. He takes a challenge – battery efficiency, or the price of getting material into orbit – and goes after it like a dog with a bone, working long into the night, sleeping in his office and urging his employees to do in months what might otherwise take a year. It is the kind of do-or-die approach that inspires evangelism in his fans and scepticism in everyone else.
At SpaceX and Tesla, where staff have been encouraged to do whatever they can to “delete” anything unnecessary, Musk’s style has been hugely successful. Rocketry, in particular, where every gram of material means a large additional cost, has proved the perfect arena for this single-minded quest for efficiency. He achieved with 500 employees what Boeing failed to do with 50,000. Explosions – or “rapid unscheduled disassemblies”, in Musk’s parlance, are learning opportunities rather than disasters. The “chopsticks” booster landing SpaceX pulled off in October, a near miraculous feat of engineering, is the most spectacular example of Musk’s dedication to reducing excess. By removing the need for landing “legs”, this landing reduces the mass of his rockets, making it quicker and cheaper to launch again.
When Musk took over at Twitter he applied the same logic to headcount. As well as renaming it “X”, he fired more than half the staff, including almost all the moderators. While Musk claimed the firings were necessary because the company was losing $4 million a day, there was also an ideological aspect. He wanted Twitter to be a free-speech platform; moderators were unnecessary. In total, Musk reduced Twitter’s headcount from around 8,000 people to 1,500. For employees, their time there became nasty, brutish and short.
In a letter to staff, Musk told them they were expected to work “long hours at high intensity” and be “extremely hardcore”, adding that anyone who did not click to opt in to the new culture would receive three months’ severance pay. Gary Rooney, an Irish employee, was fired after not responding to that email. In August, he was awarded €550,000 (£455,000) for unfair dismissal.
“If you operate on the premise of managing by fear, yes it’s effective, but it’s not a healthy motivation,” says Dr Libby Sander, a professor of organisational behaviour at Bond University in Australia and the author of a report called “Elon Musk’s ‘hardcore’ management style: a case study in what not to do”. “Because it doesn’t tend to be sustainable in the long term. It doesn’t produce the outcomes we might like if people don’t feel empowered and they’re just terrified of making a mistake.”
Rooney’s case is not the only legacy of Musk’s scorched earth HR style. This month, Leslie Berland, Twitter’s former chief marketing officer, and Parag Agrawal, its former chief executive, are among a number of senior executives who have filed multi-million pound lawsuits against Musk.
Bruce Daisley, a writer and former vice-president at Twitter (who left before Musk joined), says not all of Musk’s personnel disputes can be explained as efficiency savings.
“Elon Musk is surprisingly Trumpian in the way he works,” he says. “Maybe as a consequence of his clear achievements he brings a conviction to his opinions that frequently doesn’t survive contact with the facts. He tends to shoot from the hip based on hunches and very little evidence. At Twitter/X that meant employees who had experience quickly became disaffected because they knew he didn’t understand what he was opining on.
“Also, as with Trump, he dislikes people disagreeing with him and sees dissent as an attack.”
Peter Leyden, a former editor at Wired who now runs Reinvent Futures, a tech consultancy, says Musk’s time at Twitter/X, compared with his other businesses, is a warning that his aggressive approach is not always the best.
“Automotive and space are basically engineering challenges,” he says. And if you look at what he did with Twitter, he had that same mentality come in. It’s less clear how successful that has been. You could argue that Musk’s approach doesn’t work when it gets into industries that are really all about people, like the media or the government. Twitter is a cautionary tale.”
X’s advertising revenues are down, yet to be compensated for by the various paid-for options Musk has put in. Millions of users have quit or defected to other social media. The value of the company has been estimated at less than $10 billion, down from the $44 billion Musk paid.
It is also unclear where in government Musk would find his vaunted $2 trillion in savings. Speaking on Fox News on November 2, Musk’s mother, Maye, said: “He’s going to just get rid of people who are not working, or don’t have a job, or not doing a job well, just like he did on Twitter. He can do it for the government, too.”
If only it were that simple. The federal government employs nearly three million people, while there are another 20 million or so at state or local level. If Musk were to somehow apply Twitter tactics to the federal government, that would make 2.4 million people unemployed, an increase of 35 per cent in the overall number of US unemployed. The president only has limited discretion on the budget anyway. The bulk of government spending, on things like social security, is guaranteed by law. Where there is more discretion, on defence, it would probably be controversial to make sweeping cuts.
Besides, says Sander, not every job in government requires a rocket scientist.
“There will be some areas of the enormous machine that require innovation, but it’s also an extremely different workforce,” she says. “A lot of [jobs] are routine, they’re administrative, and they’re not jobs that a rocket scientist would want to do.”
Nor is this the first time a president has craved efficiency. Government streamlining is one of those topics that comes around every decade or so. Nobody succeeds. In the 1930s, reforms recommended by the Brownlow Commission under FDR helped to improve presidential control of government. There were two Hoover Commissions, in 1947 and 1953, aimed at reducing fraud and government wastage. Nixon had the Ash Council. In 1982, Ronald Reagan – pledging to “drain the swamp” before Trump reappropriated the phrase – had the Grace Commission. None of these initiatives has been very successful.
“It’s a conservative dream that if we have efficiency we’d get rid of fraud, waste and abuse and we’d be in fiscal paradise,” says Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor of US history at UCL. “It has never happened. It’s very, very difficult to cut. The Republicans have been trying for years to cut government and it doesn’t quite work. You never say never with Trump, but when was the last time a federal department was eliminated? Federal departments are added, not eliminated.”
Musk might have more joy cutting regulation. He has frequently bemoaned government interference in his businesses. The space and automotive industries are heavily regulated. In both, Musk has also benefited extensively from government money; in the form of green subsidies for electric cars and contracts for satellite launches.
“The big benefit for Elon seems to come from the idea of where he could cut regulation,” says Higgins. “He talks a lot about regulations that are holding him back. He tends to be very literal. SpaceX and Tesla operate in highly regulated worlds. Having the ability to influence that process could be incredibly valuable.”
Musk legislating on his own special areas of interest could easily be a recipe for corruption. “It raises a lot of conflicts of interest, because Musk has a lot of business interest in government activities,” says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a corruption watchdog. “When you come in and take a public service job, you have an obligation to the public. You can’t just raid the cabinet. When people come in and work for the public they serve the public. You want to make sure they are fair, unbiased, and not using public office for private gain.”
“He may find it was easier in the private sector,” Amey adds. “The government operates differently from a company. Some things may translate well into making the government more efficient, but others aren’t going to work. I hope people come in with a realistic process that can result in real change, and aren’t just here to throw grenades for the sake of grenades.” The legal snafus ensuing from Musk’s time at Twitter are trivial compared with what he could expect from trying to scythe through government red tape. The Department of Government Efficiency might be a Doge gag, but it also sounds like the kind of oxymoronic bureaucracy you might find in The Thick of It.
Then there is free speech. Critics of Musk’s time at Twitter argue that there has been a sharp increase in hate speech and bots and a precipitous decline in quality. He has stuck to his principles, arguing that it is the bedrock of democracy and that he hopes even his opponents remain on the platform.
Higgins believes Musk’s approach changed during Covid, partly out of frustration with the Biden administration.
“He felt slighted over not getting enough credit from them for what he’d done in the electric vehicle industry,” he says. “This animosity grew from there. And after the last election he has spoken about tech companies exercising their power in what he felt like was limiting free speech.”
“A lot of things happened during Covid,” Higgins adds. “He came out of that with a more intense worldview. Whatever captures his attention at the moment, he’s there. And since the pandemic he has become way more outspoken on contentious political issues and advocating for political decisions in ways we haven’t seen before.
“The other issue that arose is what Musk calls ‘the woke mind virus’, his shorthand for progressive liberal politics that have run amok. Moving away from merit-based achievement leaves him upset. The other issue he has talked about is his son who transitioned into his daughter, and that has clearly been an issue too.” Indeed, the polarisation that Musk might cause in office was writ large in his own family this week after the election result, when Vivian Jenna Wilson, Musk’s 20-year-old transgender daughter, from whom he is estranged, wrote: “I’ve thought this for a while, but yesterday confirmed it for me. I don’t see my future being in the United States.”
Plenty of Americans will hope Musk can make a difference. He has succeeded in the face of entrenched interests before. They do not come bigger than the US government.
“For better or worse, Musk is a guy who feels he has a place in history,” says Leyden. “It’s broader than ‘can I get a better deal for Starlink?’. I think he got into politics because he thought he could make an even bigger impact. Buying Twitter has not been good for his other businesses, but he went into it because he thinks he has to save free speech for the 21st century.”
“You could say that the Western version of the welfare state is a 20th-century legacy industry, similar to automotive and space, that needs to be reinvented profoundly,” he adds.
“It’s intriguing that Musk would bring that Silicon Valley entrepreneurial approach to government. There’s something exciting about what could be done and how he might do it. You need a crazed, entrepreneurial focus to do that when everyone else says it’s impossible. There’s a sentiment in America that we need fundamental change. Elon is the character that could actually have a shot at it.”
Unlike previous recent governments, Trump’s Republicans could well end up in control of the House and the Senate as well as the presidency, giving them wide authority to legislate. If Musk were to have success on regulation relating to his core businesses, he might go further. He is a pro-natalist, who has argued that the falling global birthrate is the biggest threat to civilisation. His end-goal for SpaceX is to put humans on Mars. Despite his frustration with other areas of regulation, he has argued for greater AI safety laws.
If Musk were to be successful in the US, you could expect other countries to follow. His approach at Twitter has given licence to other tech companies to slim down, particularly when it comes to online security and safety. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees. Two months later Google laid off 12,000. Musk’s full-throated endorsement of Trump has already seen other figures in tech, which has traditionally been a Democratic industry, follow him, especially younger ones.
There is the personal dimension to consider, too. Musk, like Trump, has a habit of falling out with people around him and has had public spats with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, among others. Trump has had powerful men work for him before. Rex Tillerson, the ExxonMobil boss, was his first secretary of state, but lasted little over a year before he fell out with his boss and was sacked, via Twitter. James Mattis was a four-star general in the Marines, but lasted just two years as secretary of defence. Trump and Musk have fallen out before, when Trump removed the US from the Paris Climate Agreement. (“Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” insisted Musk.) It seems impossible that two such large egos could coexist for long.
“Elon and Trump are both entrepreneurs, they’re both marketing whizzes, they’re both masters of social media, they both embrace billionaire populism with messages that have resonated with the masses in ways you don’t see,” says Higgins. “There are similarities there in the way they operate.”
This week, as Musk and Trump prepare for four years in power, any friction feels like the distant past.
“It’s the latest chapter in the incredible story of Elon Musk’s public life,” Higgins adds. “Whether it’s trying to get to Mars or make robot cars, or change the government, Elon Musk tends to become the central character in whatever drama he can become involved in.”
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk posted in September. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”
The opportunity has arisen. Whether Musk will find reining in government as simple as rocket science remains to be seen. The problem with hurling kitchen sinks around is that you do not know who might get hit.