New York CNN —
In November 2022, days after Elon Musk took control of the company then called Twitter, employees received an email with the subject line: “A fork in the road.” Now he’s turned his attention to the US government, and federal workers just received a memo with the same subject line.
The Twitter email offered workers an ultimatum: commit to “exceptional performance” and working “extremely hardcore” or leave the company. On Tuesday, the memo to federal government employees gave them a nearly identical choice: commit to “excellence,” and being “reliable, loyal, trustworthy,” among other things, or resign and take a buyout.
The strikingly similar language is perhaps the clearest sign yet that Musk — who is now a top advisor to President Donald Trump, with an office in the White House — appears to be bringing his Twitter takeover playbook to the federal government. And it’s raising questions about whether America’s government could rapidly slash staff like a tech company, and whether it will suffer the same consequences as Twitter, including the broken systems and sharp decline in value that has bedeviled the social media company following his acquisition.
“The freeze in all federal spending feels eerily familiar to this former Twitter employee to when Elon took over,” Lara Cohen, who left her post after Musk’s takeover as Twitter’s global head of marketing and partners, said in a Threads post Tuesday. “They come in, get no context, turn off everything without knowing who does what… That was a social media company. This is the country and this will hurt people beyond repair.”
On the campaign trail, Musk talked frequently about downsizing the federal government. And he played an integral part in the rollout of Tuesday’s federal government buyouts, an official told CNN, through his position leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
And it makes sense why Trump would be on board with such a plan, said William Klepper, a professor of management at Columbia Business School. “Trump is used to being in a reality show, right? He’s used to firing people. That’s a script that he has,” Klepper said.
But one environment is not necessarily like the other.
“Government is not business,” he said. “In business, the winning formula is the one that results in providing greater value to customers than your competitors and gives you superior profitability. In government, it’s a different perspective, for the most part you (trying to) create greater value for your constituents in terms of what you’re offering them in programming and services.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt sidestepped a question Wednesday from CNN about Musk’s involvement in the buyout, instead saying Musk’s work at DOGE has been “incredibly productive.”
On Wednesday, Musk claimed in an X post that, “Downsizing government is the most popular issue by far!” The post referenced a Reuters/Ipsos poll that mainly shows opposition to Trump’s executive orders but says that 44% of Americans support ending government “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.
The day before Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, which he’s re-dubbed X, he walked through the front door with a toilet. Starting within hours of his takeover the following day, Musk took something like a hacksaw to the company, moves that he said were essential to “save” the company but that caused chaos.
The billionaire laid off a majority of the company’s staff — and then had to ask dozens of workers to return.
He ordered the closure of at least one data center — and the platform experienced numerous glitches and outages in the following months.
He slashed the company’s safety teams, dismantled content moderation policies and welcomed White supremacists and misinformation peddlers back to the platform — and many users and advertisers fled.
The company was sued by landlords and vendors who accused it of failing to pay up for rent or agreed upon services. And it was investigated by San Francisco city officials for putting up an illegal sign and over reports that Musk’s team had set up bedrooms in office spaces.
Those and other controversial moves by the world’s richest man — among them, using the site to boost racist conspiracy theories — have by most accounts turned what was once one of the world’s most important and influential sources of real-time information into a more toxic, less reliable and less useful place and fueled the emergence of several competing platforms. (Still, Musk and the company’s other leaders continue to refer to X as a global town square.)
And since Musk’s takeover, the company’s value has fallen by about 80%, Fidelity estimated last fall.
Still, while the takeover may have hurt Twitter employees, users, advertisers and – at least in one sense — Musk’s own pocketbook, it has also added to his own personal power. Over the summer, Musk used X to try to sway public opinion in favor of Trump. And since Trump’s reelection, Musk now has the president’s ear and an office in the White House — and he’s become tens of billions of additional dollars richer, on the back of expectations that his connection to Trump will benefit his empire of companies.
And for that reason, he may have little incentive to change his employment – and layoff – strategy in his new role at DOGE.
–CNN’s Samantha Waldenberg and Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
