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Of course the idea of having to explain what you did this week to your boss is not absurd. Elon Musk is not the boss of anyone in the government, though, and people who won't see the email are just the beginning of why this is a stupid idea. What about employees who are on leave? Out sick? Working jobs without email access? (Lots of government jobs involve being out in the field for extended periods.) Working on classified networks? One could charitably assume that Musk intended such obvious cases to be exceptions to the "Everyone must answer by Monday midnight" edict, but he indicated no such exceptions or even awareness that such might exist. Moreover, I can only assume he intends to use some kind of AI to process these emails since he can't possibly have enough employees in DOGE to read them. On Twitter he's shit-posting about how "All you have to do is use words that make sense about what you're doing- such a low bar!" Yeah bro, so how is your LLM going to individually judge each and every response and decide if it was adequate? If it flags it as "insufficient" does a human review it, or has he set up an automated system to send out termination letters? Which I would not put past him, and which is, also, illegal, because Musk has no legal authority to terminate civil servants.
It's so ridiculous, I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies"
TwitterX drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
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