The e -mail ended up in the inboxes of employees with the subject line: “Fork in the way.” The message in the e -mail was strong: accept a swept series of workplace changes or decreases.
That was the comment that millions of federal employees received on Tuesday around 5 p.m. It repeated a similar message that thousands of employees at Twitter received from Elon Musk at the end of 2022 after he bought the company.
Mr. Musk brought his takeover tactics from Twitter to the federal government, where he has become a close adviser to President Trump and manages the cost-saving initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency. The administration already eliminates diversity initiatives, tested technical bravery and demanding loyalty of federal employees, embraced maneuvers musk to lower the budget and activities of his social media company.
The E -mail from Tuesday, sent by the Office of Personnel Management, was the last example of the fingerprints of the billionaire, up to the underwent print -the same as its buyout offer from 2022 to Twitter employees.
“It's a knife-at-throat feeling,” said Rumman Chowdhury, a former Twitter director who left the company, now known as X after the takeover of Mr. Musk. “The uncertainty is wild.”
Mr. Musk and a spokeswoman for his cost -saving initiative of the government did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
Mr. Musk has previously said that he expects to cut $ 2 trillion from the federal budget. Between 5 and 10 percent of federal employees were expected to accept the exit packages on Tuesday, “which could lead to around $ 100 billion in savings,” said Mr. Musk's Political Action Committee, America Pac, in a position on X.
Mr. Musk, who also leads Tesla and SpaceX, called in 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 the tunneling startup of Mr. Musk, the boring company, helped to supervise the cost savings on Twitter and is now leading DOGE. Brian Bjelde, an old Human Resources director 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 contributed to leading the Twitter acquisition of Mr. Musk, is expected to take a senior job at the Commerce department.
One of Mr. Musk's software thus engineers at Tesla, Thomas Shedd, was named head of “Technology Transformation Services” at the General Services Administration, which helps to manage federal agencies. Mr. Shedd immediately used a musketactics: asking for proof of technical pork chops from engineers.
Mr. Shedd asked for engineers to sign up for sessions in which they could share 'a recent individual technical victory', according to an e -mail that was sent to more than 700 employees on Tuesday evening and viewed by The Times.
“These sessions are an opportunity to understand the types of expertise we have,” said Mr. Shedd in his e -mail, who emphasized his “hours on the factory floor” in Tesla.
Only one day after acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk demanded that engineers print and share the code they had written for the various products of the company.
Mr. Musk also quickly worked to undo diversity initiatives at the social media company – a movement reflected by Mr Trump's flurry of executive orders, his first week in function, which eliminated diversity and inclusion efforts in the federal government.
“These programs divided Americans per breed, wasted taxpayer dollars and resulted in shameful discrimination,” said E -mails that were viewed by The Times to federal employees.
After he bought Twitter, Mr. Musk struck the attempts of earlier management to promote diversity, sharing a video in which he mocked shirts for the black employee of the company. Under his leadership, the company has reduced financing for employee groups and took a mural in honor of the Black Lives Matter movement in his office in San Francisco, according to two former employees.
One of Mr. Tactics from Mr. Musk for lowering the costs at Twitter was the reduction of the company's footprint. He stopped paying rent for different office spaces around the world, which led to expansions from different facilities, including in Seattle and Boulder, Colo.
The General Services Administration also focuses on real estate for cost savings. Stephen Ehikian, a former Tech director and Trump -appointed, told employees in an e -mail viewed on Tuesday by The Times that two of the property of the Agency would be mentioned for sale while three lease contracts were terminated. The move would save around $ 11 million and was a “first step” in lowering real estate expenditure, according to the E -mail.
While Mr. Musk finally transformed Twitter, the staff reduced by 80 percent and his real estate footprint is minimized, the company has decreased. Advertisers have fled the site in large numbers and at least one investor, Fidelity, estimates that the company is now worth 72 percent less than the $ 44 billion he has paid for it.
“Our user growth is stagnant, the turnover is not impressive and we hardly break even,” Mr. Musk wrote earlier this month in an e -mail to X employees, which was viewed by the New York Times and previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. “We must be faster, innovative and ruthlessly focused.”
Mr. Musk dived on Tuesday evening on one of his 2024 reports on X, and seemed to refer to the E -mail “Fork in the way” to federal employees, who demanded that they “reliable, loyal, reliable” and “striving for excellence “.
Some government workers are looking for former Twitter employees for guidance.
Various federal employees spread online messages from Dr. Chowdhury giving advice on how to respond to a musk takeover. Others contacted Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer in the labor market that Mr. Musk suits on behalf of former Twitter employees.
“Elon clearly thinks that he learned from Twitter how to decimate a workplace and he is now trying to roll the same playbook with the federal government,” said Mrs. Liss-Riordan.
Theodore Schleifer” Ana Swanson And Maureen Farrell contributed reporting.
