'Minister' Elon Musk will cut 75% of agencies, require government employees to submit weekly performance reports, and must account for every penny of the budget
Requiring employees to account for every expense and preferring to cut too much rather than fire too little are two of Elon Musk's signature work cultures.
Save every penny
On a Saturday morning in December 2022, Elon Musk convened the chief financial officers at Twitter, the social network he had bought just six weeks earlier, to dig deeper into its spending.
According to the New York Times (NYT), Elon Musk was very angry even though Twitter had just cut more than 3/4 of its staff, from 8,000 to just 1,500 workers. However, the company's spending still did not meet the new boss's expectations.
So for 6 consecutive hours, the world's richest billionaire with a fortune of more than 300 billion USD read each line in the spending spreadsheet and asked the employee to explain each item.
Since then, Elon Musk has ordered a complete cut in many expenses such as luxury car rental services for Twitter executives. The boss even had a personal fight with an employee responsible for a multimillion-dollar contract related to website security.
According to Elon Musk, his company Tesla spent much less for the same task but the employee still protested and the boss eventually fired her right in the meeting.
According to the NYT, this is just one of many work cultures of Elon Musk to cut costs.
The 53-year-old billionaire’s success in cutting corners is the secret to his success with Tesla and SpaceX. Now, the same approach is being applied to Twitter-X and, perhaps, the US government as “Minister” of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Over nearly 30 years as an entrepreneur, Elon Musk has honed his stinginess by digging into the little details and cutting as deep as possible.
Tesla's boss believes it's better to cut too much than to fire too little.
The NYT commented that Elon Musk is completely indifferent to layoffs, not caring about standards, conventions, or the difficult situation of employees, but only paying attention to performance.
The NYT source said that this technology billionaire is even willing to cut costs so deeply that sometimes the company's operating procedures or product safety standards are broken due to lack of human resources.
But Elon Musk didn't care because he thought anyone could be fired and everything could be fixed later. This was the cause of the chaos at Twitter-X in the early stages of the new boss's takeover.
Even with suppliers, Elon Musk is not afraid to insult or force to negotiate a better price. If he does not get the price he wants, this billionaire will find a way to produce it himself or find a cheaper way.
"Elon Musk is a businessman and he wants to cut everything to the bone," said SpaceX's first vice president of business development, Jim Cantrell.
Now, Elon Musk is expected to apply his and the US government's penny-pinching, fire-first-and-think-later culture.
Lean like Twitter-X
Donald Trump said the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will dramatically change the US government by significantly cutting down on bloated agencies and the man responsible for this is Elon Musk.
The world's richest billionaire himself also loves this job, constantly posting on Twitter-X about how the US government is wasting taxpayers' money.
“The scale of government waste is staggering!” Elon Musk tweeted on Twitter-X on November 13, 2024.
During Donald Trump’s election campaign, Elon Musk himself pledged to cut $2 trillion, or 30%, of the US government’s budget. According to the Tesla boss, the US government would only need 99 agencies instead of the current 400, or a 75% cut.
$YGG $UMA $BTC