It strikes me that there are so many random requests coming from all over the place that this would be a great opportunity for a large scale phishing attack posing as Elon/DOGE.
Definitely not a ruse.
I worked for a startup run by a wannabe Jobs/Musk type about a decade ago and when the budget started getting tight they pulled the same playbook: demanding unreasonable hours, putting hard working people on the spot about what they do, summarily firing all contractors etc.. it was a bad time and the C Suite eventually got fired.
Downplaying it as a ruse is like describing a mugging as a property dispute.
Musk (1) impersonated a manager to (2) declare a fraudulent employment policy in order to (3) threaten employees and create a hostile working environment with the goal of (4) constructive dismissal.
P.S. Item #1 may not apply depending on on some other court cases, where the Trump administration is refusing to say exactly WTF Musk's role actually is, probably because no matter which mutually-exclusive thing they pick they've still broken the law.
This seems more like “lol I was just joking”….
He is calling it a ruse because other Trump appointees told their employees that Elon can go pound sand, and he couldnt bear to face the fact that he got told no.
God what a fucking man-child. The most insecure human I have even witnessed. It is embarrassing.
I've been reading the air traffic controller subreddit (r/atc) and it really shows how unbelievably stupid and uninformed Elon is.
The air traffic controllers don't have government laptops. They don't use workstations with email. So in order to respond to this email, if they weren't working today, they had to come into the office and get paid overtime to respond. If they were working today, they had to find time and a laptop to respond (and not do their job controlling air traffic). And the whole management chain must have spent the whole day trying to figure out how to deal with all of this since it was not thought out at all.
So the Department of Government Efficiency wasted a ton of time and money getting air traffic controllers to email what they're working on, which is utterly pointless since everything air traffic controllers do is already recorded.