“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
“Ozymandias” — Percy Shelley
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
President Musk instigated a fire storm of public outrage with this EMAIL he is credited with getting the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) to send to every Federal civil servant:
This is hardly the first time he’s pulled such a stunt and certainly won’t be the last.
He did so rather infamously after he finally closed and settled his purchase of Twitter and purged thousands of employees throughout the country causing all manner of chaos leading to the site being unstable and advertisers fleeing in droves.
I’d still argue Twitter is unstable but that’s more a matter of it becoming an even worse cesspool of extreme ideology and hate than it already was under the guise of the First Amendment guarantee of “free speech” which is completely irrelevant in a private website.
The prohibition is to prevent the GOVERNMENT from unduly stifle free speech and even then there are plenty of instances where they might adversely affect your First Amendment rights in very narrowly tailored circumstances.
But it was this response he posted that really caught my attention that really captures of the essence of who he truly is as a manager and how little value anyone else who doesn’t have billions of dollars in the bank or indeed any money he can extract from them is in his view.
His body of work to this point even before he was appointed His Majesty’s Hatchet Man-In-Chief made it starkly clear…other people are disposable commodities worthy of no more respect or dignity than you’d give a cog in a machine.
If he chucks thousands of people into the rubbish bin because it puts extra money in his pockets, he’s all in.
People are apparently put on this planet to service him and his wants and desires until they’re no longer of use and then into the tip they go without a second thought.
Quelle surprise that these inexperienced fools would make some huge mistakes in their hack-and-slash operation like firing all of the people in charge of maintaining our nuclear weapons and then having to desperately try to rescind the terminations and rehire those same people likely at a fantastic waste of money that we’re never going to see them disclose publicly. Even though it’d screw the taxpayers, I’d like to imagine that more than one of the fired workers offered to be rehired at many times their previous pay grade and liquidated damages instead of a wrongful termination lawsuit.
He’s certainly found his soul mate in His Majesty King Donald I but only the elements know how long it will be before they tire of each other and who is able to slip the knife into the other’s back first. I’m not really even sure at this point who I should really hope prevails between them in such a hypothetical fight.
The irony is that for people who demand absolute loyalty and aren’t above imposing loyalty tests and oaths upon those unfortunate enough to serve in their employ, they’re utterly incapable of anything approaching loyalty to a higher standard other than to their own desires.
That sort of transactional “you are only of use to me as long as I can derive profit off you” mentality is so utterly foreign to everything I know about real leadership.
“Leaders” such as these two make such a big show of how everyone’s happy to live in the office and work 120 hours a week for 40 hours pay (if they’re lucky) and want the huge displays of cheers and accolades (watch the coverage of a SpaceX launch when they cut to the facility in Hawthorne) that clearly accrue to the dear leader.
But I genuinely wonder how much of SpaceX’s or Tesla’s success is actually due to Elon Musk in any way other than the money he puts into those ventures or are they successful because the actual talent refuses to fail in spite of Elon Musk’s “leadership”.
Certainly a “visionary leader” wouldn’t have made such an elementary mistake with the OPM EMAIL which is guaranteed to attract very little in useful operational intelligence on how to improve the efficiencies amongst the departments. It’s clear they could care less about the morale of the civil service and Elon Musk and his DOGE associates have shown a clear lack of understanding of the many things the civil service does to execute the laws that were duly passed by Congress and signed by the President.
Instead of truly harnessing the resources available to them in a productive way, Musk and DOGE seem hell-bent on shoveling as many people into the occupational furnaces as they can without any attempt to understand what work these people are doing and the constraints they’re working under which are often out of their control.
Real leaders would be asking these experts in the civil service where the main impediments are to them doing their job efficiently and more cost-effectively. Instead of presuming they’re evil villains just joyriding the gravy train to an index-linked pension, they might be surprised to find that the people most frustrated at contradictory governing law and regulations and wasteful spending are the civil servants themselves.
A real leader might have thought to ask for much more useful information in a way that shows respect and a willingness to have an adult conversation and find solutions to the problems the civil services experiences every day.
IMO, the response I suggested to President Musk would have likely given his DOGE goons tonnes of actionable efficiencies to be found without the indiscriminate and frankly stupid gutting of the Federal workforce.
I’d be surprised if any responses weren’t the usual sycophant-bots and trolls and even more shocked if Elon Musk himself would deign to reply from upon his throne but if he does, I’ll be more than happy to follow up.
In the meantime, my response to this EMAIL would be this:
“My immediate supervisor is already well aware of my work activities and accomplishments for the period of time of interest. You’re more than welcome to follow up with them should you wish but I believe a more productive use of time would be to highlight these areas of concerns with efficiency and use of resources as well as the root causes and suggested solutions to be implemented.”
Between that and cutting-and-pasting from a document I’d have been compiling all along of roadblocks and ways round them, it would only take about three minutes total.
But if all he’s interested in is just being an arrogant ass who believes himself superior to people who are actually experts in what they’re doing and why they do it that way rather than trying to engage in productive dialogue on how to improve things on behalf of the American people, the other possible answer only takes ten seconds including hitting the SEND button… 😉