Former members of Twitter staff fear Elon Musk will slash and burn the US government if his mooted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ever gets off the ground.
“Elon is like Wolverine: slash everything with his claws first, worry about consequences later,” Manu Cornet, a software engineer who was fired by Musk shortly after he bought the social media platform now known as X, told i.
Donald Trump announced this week Musk will co-lead the DOGE, named jokingly after a popular cult cryptocurrency, in collaboration with Vivek Ramaswamy.
“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” Trump wrote in a statement announcing his appointments for when he takes over the presidency from Joe Biden in January.
The statement quoted Musk as saying: “This will send shockwaves through the system”.
Whether Musk and Trump co-exist long enough in the next two months for the mooted department, which Trump revealed would sit outside government, to ever launch is questionable. But if it does, staff members who faced the consequences of Musk slashing staff at Twitter when he bought it in October 2022 fear it could have a deleterious impact on how the US government operates.
Cornet, the former employee, was one of those cut from the company, but was far from alone: Musk fired around 80 per cent of staff as part of a mass efficiency drive that pushed the platform to the precipice of failure.
Musk infamously pushed staff working for the company he took over to the brink in his drive for more efficiency, requiring them to work all hours and to prove their worth to the firm. Notoriously, he asked software engineers to print off the computer code they had worked on and present it to him in one-on-one meetings.
In his early days overseeing Twitter, Musk also sent out late-night all-staff emails asking the company’s global workforce to meet in the firm’s San Francisco headquarters the following day – a trip that was a physical impossibility given the timeframe for many who worked internationally.
Musk’s whims left staff in a state of perpetual insecurity, admitted Esther Crawford, a senior executive who quickly became one of Musk’s trusted lieutenants during his early days owning the company, before leaving X in 2023.
“I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all,” she wrote. “I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale.”
She called the company culture “brutalist”. Musk described it in emails he sent to staff as “extremely hardcore” and told workers they were required to “work long hours at high intensity”.
“From my experience Elon thinks he’s smarter than everyone around him and because of that he going to trying to trim down departments that he deems ‘useless’,” one former Twitter engineering staff member who was fired from the company following Musk’s takeover told i.
The former staff member spoke on condition of anonymity because his current employer does not let staff speak to journalists.
They said the problem with Musk is that his short-term vision for the company isn’t always best for it in the long term. Repeatedly during the early days of his tenure, the social network faced glitches and temporary outages as errors occurred that would previously have been fixed by engineering staff Musk let go from the firm.
Making such unforced errors as a result of slashing staff numbers could be more damaging to the US government than it is to a private company such as Twitter.
The site continues to operate, despite the difficulties, and has since been rebranded as X. Arguably it played a role in helping get Trump elected, as did Musk’s campaigning for the president-elect as he campaigned around the country.
But Musk’s management style will be materially different for a government, as hinted at by Crawford in her departing missive from the firm in 2023.
“I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct,” she wrote, “and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it.”
Expect vibes-based policy decisions – which may horrify some, but could be music to the ears of Donald Trump.
