Although Donald Trump is not the president yet and the Department of Government Efficiency (or ‘DOGE’ for short if you would like to save time and be more efficient about it by just using a shortened version of the name by taking the first letters of each word and combining them together into another pronounceable word, AKA (also known as) an ‘acronym’, then you can) is not yet up and running, Elon Musk has already started to save government time by having his followers bully government employees off social media.
Last week, Elon Musk, the world’s richest (and most beloved) man reposted two X posts with the names of four government employees. Those employees were then subjected to negativity from some of Musk’s 206 million followers, leading to at least one of the employees to delete their social media accounts.
Musk has not commented on whether the cyberbullying was performed in an official DOGE capacity or a happy byproduct. Either way, one harassed government employee has saved hundreds of hours a day, hours that they can now use to do their job. Mission accomplished.
But it isn’t just death threats and deleting their X accounts that government officials are afraid of, it’s also their jobs. Simply by ‘X’ing about any government position Elon could put pressure on an employee to leave their career without proper review. Is this too much power for one man to have? I don’t know, is over 300 billion dollars too much power for one man to have? Meh, probably fine.
Musk re-’X’ed an X from an X account called @fentasyl with a screenshot of an obscure government position and said, “So many fake jobs”. The job in question: the director of “Climate Diversification” at the United States International Development Finance Corporation (and, OK, that is a mouthful). But it makes you wonder though, does Musk think this person’s job was diversity and inclusion as many of his followers seemed to think? Or does Musk know that the job involves financial diversification, spreading assets, you know, something a successful businessman might understand? Something that, if we’re talking about climate, might direct funds to Musk’s own Tesla car company?
There’s a chance he’s right, and this specific job isn’t necessary, but there’s no chance he’s IN the right, judging someone’s necessity by their job title alone. And he’s certainly not in the right flippantly Xing about the problem and doxxing someone in the process.
When it comes to directing the internet’s anger, maybe X is a little too efficient.
