Elon Musk Tells Federal Workers to Detail Work in an Email or Lose Their Jobs

The demand left many workers reeling.

Most of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s work force had recently been placed on leave as Mr. Musk gutted the agency, and have been instructed not to work — leaving them with no accomplishments to report, a worker there said.

Mr. Musk’s allies in government have suggested using artificial intelligence to identify budget cuts, and workers at several agencies worried their responses would be assessed by A.I.

The approach echoed one Mr. Musk took with executives and employees at Twitter. In April 2022, Mr. Musk was set to join the board at the social media company, but bickered with Parag Agrawal, its chief executive at the time, over his public criticism of the company. When Mr. Agrawal asked Mr. Musk not to post detrimental things about Twitter, Mr. Musk responded in a text, “What did you get done this week?” and then told Mr. Agrawal he would buy Twitter outright.

The exchange led to Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company, which he completed in October 2022. Mr. Musk claimed he fired Mr. Agrawal immediately, although Mr. Agrawal contested the circumstances of his departure and sued Mr. Musk for withholding severance payments.

Shortly after the acquisition, Mr. Musk told employees to print out code they had written recently — an exercise intended to prove how hard they worked. When executives at the company raised privacy concerns, Mr. Musk instructed employees to shred the code they had printed.

On Saturday, Mr. Musk acknowledged the similarities. “Parag got nothing done. Parag was fired,” he wrote in an X post about the message he intended to send to federal workers.

Nicholas Nehamas, Maggie Haberman, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Madeleine Ngo, Mattathias Schwartz, Matthew Goldstein, Erica L. Green, Eileen Sullivan, Margot Sanger-Katz, Edward Wong, Mark Walker, Kennedy Elliott Lisa Friedman and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.