How does Elon Musk define ‘efficiency’? We asked his former employees

Elon Musk has big plans for his new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) once Donald Trump takes the White House in January. Prior to the election, the Tesla CEO said he would help cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!” Musk said in a statement. (DOGE, which Musk will co-lead alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, will actually sit outside government and will only “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” according to Trump.)

So, what  does efficiency look like under the world’s richest man? And how exactly does he typically go about minimizing “waste”?

To find out, Fast Company asked some of his former employees.

“He’s very ruthless and very involved in understanding what you’re trying to do and how you’re doing it,” says Jim Cantrell, who worked at SpaceX in the early 2000s. “He has no fear of failure. It’s almost naïve in its lack of fear, but his performance has shown it’s anything but naïve.”

Musk’s unorthodox attitude can be costly, too. While he successfully defeated a legal challenge that would have cost him $500 million or more for unlawfully denying Twitter staff severance payments they thought they were owed, he did have to pay an Irish Twitter employee $580,000 for being fired for not replying to an email asking to remain with the company. More financial pain could be coming for Musk from his other companies, too. Former SpaceX employees are seeking financial redress for being fired after blowing the whistle on what they claim was bad behavior by employees within the company. The National Labor Relations Board is also investigating.

“Musk treated his employees and the work we’d done with open contempt,” says Melissa Ingle, who worked as a senior data scientist at Twitter when Musk took ownership of the social network. Ingle was among the 80% of staff laid off shortly after Musk’s $44 billion acquisition.“There was absolutely no wind down,” Ingle says. “One Thursday Musk came in and announced layoffs would be happening, and the next day half the permanent employees were gone. The next week almost all contract employees were fired.” (Neither Musk nor X responded to a request for comment.)

Ingle says Musk’s drive for cost-cutting came at the expense of operations. “These firings seem to have been undertaken with no regard to the actual work that needed to be done, since after the firing, there was mass chaos as the remaining managers still had to get their work done but had been forced to fire anyone with actual experience performing the work,” she says. The chaos that ensued after the mass firings because of short-staffing and the loss of institutional knowledge has been documented in a number of places, including by Walter Isaacson, who reported in his biography of Musk that the billionaire railed against the idea that Twitter staff should cherish “psychological safety.” Musk also had to be dissuaded from firing random engineers, according to Isaacson.  “Any remaining employees will likely face tremendous pressure to perform to Musk’s extreme standards,” says Ingle, who now works as a chief data scientist at the firm Technology Partners.

Beyond the pressures employees face, there are severe potential conflicts of interest that could arise under Musk. “In Elon Musk, Trump has chosen someone who has a direct financial interest in government spending more in very specific areas,” says Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Koshgarian points out that some areas of government waste may be more prone to slashing than others under the entrepreneur’s eye. “Musk’s SpaceX has contracts with the Pentagon,” she says. “The Pentagon budget is nearing $1 trillion, and half of that goes to contractors. There’s tremendous potential for cuts there. But will the Pentagon be a target for Musk’s agency, or will he focus on cutting programs like education and the environment that aren’t adding to his personal wealth?”

Other ex-employees of Musk have levied their own public criticisms against the billionaire’s efficiency-at-all-costs philosophy. For example, Vincent Peters, who worked under Musk at SpaceX in the 2010s, told Business Insider “It’s a place where you have to be able to hold yourself accountable. It’s assumed that you should know what you should be doing.” 

That approach could now be taken within the government as Musk and Trump buddy up closer together. Musk has reportedly been advising Trump on his cabinet appointments and has been spending time at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s Florida haunt. Musk’s growing relationship with the president-elect comes on the heels of a months-long campaigning effort, during which Musk donated $200 million to the Trump campaign through his America PAC. 

Still, it’s anyone’s guess how long that bromance will last. Given Trump’s history of soured political alliances, Musk may want to work quickly. Which is exactly what Cantrell expects him to do. “When we started SpaceX back in 2001, it was literally an act of insanity to say we’re going to do privately with 50 people what the U.S. government and other nation states have done,” he says. “It’s kind of like him saying: ‘We can cut $2 or $3 trillion out of the budget.’ That appears insane at this point, but the guy does it.”

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