- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
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.
“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.
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.
I wonder how much money that accounts for. Sounds like this unelected ketamine fueled fuckwit is wasting government money. I hear there is an efficiency department now, someone should report him for excessive waste of public taxpayer funded money.
Let’s throw some numbers around. Quick google search says that federal workers make $35/hour on average and that there’s about 3 million workers. Let’s be generous for Elmo and say that only half of the workers received and/or reacted to the email and that they only spent an hour on responding, attending to meetings with colleagues and so on about the case.
So, 1.5 million hours * 35 dollars per hour equals to cool 52,5 million. Adjust numbers on how ever you like. 50-200 million is a big pile of cash, but in the US government scale that’s not much above a rounding error. Pretty hefty bill anyways from a single email sent by a guy whose authorization on anything is pretty much just ‘trust me bro’.
Government discretionary budget is like $2T. Wasting say a quarter of a day (2 hours) of the 250 or so working days in a year is about 1/1000th the total year wasted. So figure $2B wasted, approximately.
That’s about 1000× as much as he’s actually “saved” in line items
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Reconnaissance-in-force