Elon Musk's new strategy to lay off people in the United States: send an email; agencies call to ignore said message

The South African entrepreneur Elon Musk has put into practice a new strategy focused on assessing the performance of workers from various agencies and determining their "functionality" within their work area through an email. 

Through his official X account, the owner of Tesla shared a post where he indicated that, as part of his work at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, by its acronym in English), he would be sending emails to collaborators from various organizations such as NASA, the FBI, with the purpose of knowing what tasks they have carried out during the last week. 

According to what was revealed by Fortune magazine, the subject of the email was: "What did you do last week?". 

However, despite how ordinary this task may seem for millions of workers daily, the condition of the email generated controversy. It was mentioned by the billionaire that, within the same email, it was pointed out that not receiving a response indicated that the worker was not active and the position was unnecessary.

Agencies call on their workers to “ignore” Musk 

Musk's actions logically triggered a wave of reactions from the agencies themselves. Such is the case of NASA, which through a statement to its workers, obtained by the media outlet Bloomberg, urged them to “ignore” said message and continue with their duties. 

The space agency also spread among its staff, consisting of more than 17 thousand employees, that they should not respond to Musk's email until they had guidance on how to address the question due to the imminent danger of disclosing confidential information. 

“Pause any response to the email in question, to avoid disclosing confidential or pre-decision-making information to unknown recipients”, was spread in NASA's statement to its workers. 

The FBI and the Pentagon, on their part, also instructed their collaborators not to respond to said message. Even, and according to AP, the newly appointed director of the U.S. espionage agency, Kash Patel, mentioned that the Office of the Director is responsible for conducting review processes. 

Musk's erroneous strategy 

According to Fortune's estimates, Musk's action, consisting of sending more than 8 million emails, would imply the “investment” of over 166 thousand work hours to analyze and respond to said messages.  

This is not the first time Musk has used this kind of strategy to “intimidate” employees with the intention of seeking dismissal. In 2022, after taking over X, formerly known as Twitter, it was revealed that the South African sent thousands of emails urging his workers to resign if they did not agree with the new labor policies. 

The exercise carried out by Musk led to the resignation of nearly 80% of the social network’s staff, making it clear Elon's “limited” patience with work processes. 

*This article has been translated automatically using artificial intelligence