When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he dismissed thousands of employees, stopped paying rent and auctioned off in the hope of a large turn of coffee machines and office chairs.
Now the richest man in the world of the Federal Government has brought the same strategy with slash-and-burn strategy, and some people who experienced Musks takeover on Twitter.
Since the assumption of the leadership of the Ministry of Government Efficiency, Musk has consolidated large parts of the government with the blessing of President Donald Trump, gave career officials, have been given access to sensitive databases and invited a constitutional accident on the limits of the presidential authority.
Emily Horne, who was the communication of Twitter before the Biden administration was justified, describes Musk Modus Operandi as: “Take it ruthlessly and delete everyone he sees as an opposition and crash surgery, to be in his worldview to redesign. “
It is unclear whether his advance on “extremely hardcore” changes has paid off on Twitter. The sales of the company called X has fallen, the number of users has decreased and even Muschus itself has frustrated how long it takes to turn around the company’s finances.
“It doesn’t work,” said Ross Gerber, a minority stock holder at X, who wrote down his share to zero and expects Musk to fail in Washington. “The federal government will eat it up and spit it out.”
After a few measures, X is still a success. The platform continues to attract hundreds of millions of users worldwide and has consolidated the political influence of Musk. But just as it is financially, it is difficult to say because the company is private.
In the same week when Musk’s teams threatened to take tens of thousands of federal workers, bankers who borrowed billions from dollars to buy Twitter were losses and attempted to unload loans for others. Musk apparently gave up hope of getting important advertisers back on the platform and has sued some of them.
Examples of budget -oriented economic leaders who brought their skills in the work of the government, however, made it clear on Twitter and Doge that his priorities go beyond efficiency in order to eradicate a “woke” agenda.
Long before combating the diversity, Musk became a core of Trump’s third presidential campaign from Trump and the DEI initiatives of Twitter and the people who managed it.
“The culture of Twitter has died,” said former employee Theodora Skadas, whose job was bought in the weeks after the purchase of Musk Twitter in October 2022 for $ 44 billion.
Another tactic that brings Musk to the government: “performances of loyalty”.
In this way, the former Twitter manager Rumman Chowdhury Musk drive to prove the value of her work in a way that she has proven. For example, the engineers were asked to print out code and then exclude an inexperienced engineer.
“It is an fear and intimidation tactics,” said Chowdhury. “I don’t know if the best leadership style is in the long term, how abyss, how miserably Twitter/X is.”
Musk later tried to create some of the engineers he had fired. To threaten his instinct, also fell back with advertisers.
Within months after taking on Musk, the advertising revenues fell by half when brands X fled due to fears that he was too loosening the moderation of the content. But instead of rewriting the companies, Musk went to X to threaten “Thermonuclear Names & Scham” because they had left its platform. Later at a conference, he used an expantive and asked them: “Not advertising”.
“Talk about shooting in the foot,” said the advertising consultant Tom Hespos from Abydos Media, who informed its customers at that time that they should not even be published on X because this could damage their brand. “This is probably the worst comment he could have made.”
In August Musk doubled by suing Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and several other companies that had dropped Twitter and accused them of participating in an “illegal boycott”. On Saturday he added more companies to the lawsuit, including Lego, Shell International, Tyson Food, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive.
His jurisdiction with more than 2,000 former Twitter workers are also a sign of the kind of court fights that could wait for the government. On Thursday on the same day, a federal judge set a midnight period on the same day, on which government agents accepted “postponed resignation”, which promises until September without working.
The e -mail, in which the offer with the title “Fork in the Road” was announced, repeated a similar e -mail musk, which was sent to the Twitter workforce in 2022.
More than two years later, Musk’s X still “issues an insane amount of money”, which defends herself against the allegations of former Twitter employees that she owes money, said lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan, who represents hundreds of employees. She said it would have been cheaper to pay them what was owed to them.
“If this is made for the federal government, I am very concerned about the Federal Government’s finances,” she said.
Neither X nor Doge answered inquiries about comments from the Associated Press.
In addition to the pushing of the company’s workforce and the auction of memorabilia and office furniture, Musks simply did not include extreme cost reduction strategy on Twitter. Landlords of the headquarters of the social media company in San Francisco and the British offices brought the company to unpaid rent for millions of dollars.
The British case opted for an unknown sum. The San Francisco case was released last year; It is not clear whether a comparison was paid.
Musk also brought one of the real estate managers from X to the government.
Even if the X cuts were an uneducated success, it is unclear whether the same tactics to circulate the costs and the provision of services to government agencies.
Nicholas Bagley, a legal professor at the University of Michigan, said that Musk and Trump are the constitutional power that belongs to the congress, and not the executive department, and he predicts legal disputes about the steps that will reduce their efforts.
“All of this is of dubious legality, and that is before they come to the protection of the public service,” said Bagley and referred to federal offers that prevent layoffs from preventing political purposes. “You will see a lot of bombast and rhetoric, but I suspect that fewer things will bring.”
Some in Musk’s orbit tried to warn him of the move, including the prominent Tech investor Paul Graham, who recently asked in an X -Exchange Muschus “to take time and to do it carefully”.
The government “is not just a company. Companies are born and die in the system, and it’s okay. But this is the system itself that we are talking about here.”
The owner of the minority X Stock Gerber, CEO of the investment company Gerber Kawasaki, praises Musk for the belonging of the “Special Forces of Business” in his companies. But he believes that musk will fail in Washington.
“The idea that you can fire all of these people doesn’t work,” he said. “We see an epic fight.”