The went well... NOT!

Elon Musk's mass layoff playbook was tested in the Bay Area

As the Department of Government Efficiency continues to overhaul Washington, workers on the West Coast may be feeling some deja vu

By Kimberly Alters

The razing of the federal government at the hands of Elon Musk in just six weeks has been a shock to witness. For a certain subset of the Bay Area workforce, though, it’s deja vu. 

Musk, through his Department of Government Efficiency, has defined the early days of the second Donald Trump administration, slashing personnel and funding and virtually eliminating entire agencies. He’s initiated not one but two rounds of emails to scores of workers requesting they list precisely what they accomplished in the past week, in order to justify their employment. He’s sown chaos, confusion and resentment, all in the name of austerity and truth-telling.

It’s a playbook that was born in the Bay Area, full of tactics stolen from his dismantling of the San Francisco tech company formerly known as Twitter. Shortly after his purchase of Twitter Inc. closed in 2022, the Muskification began, subjecting scores of Bay Area workers to the same disarray that is now engulfing the federal bureaucracy.

Musk enjoys, and even gains power from, dramatic optics. In San Francisco, he first showed his force by entering the company’s then-headquarters at 1355 Market St. while his acquisition of the company was still being finalized. Clad in his signature black T-shirt, he walked into the building carrying a sink, a jokey jab to let the news of the takeover “sink in.” 

In Washington, D.C., he also made an early real estate-based stand, demanding space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House after rejecting the more modest West Wing office that had been cleared for him, according to the New York Times. Then, he started bragging about sleeping in his DOGE office, Wired reported. He did the same in the early weeks of his Twitter reign, converting offices to bedrooms in the San Francisco building and triggering an investigation by the city’s Department of Building Inspection. He put a giant blinking light on the roof, a decor choice he apparently repeated albeit on a smaller scale inside his DOGE office.

Then, he turned his attention to the workers.

Morale plunged almost immediately inside Twitter as Musk stormed in promising staff cuts and “extremely hardcore” hours. He dissolved the independent Trust and Safety Council, directed a torrent of homophobic abuse at an executive and laid off thousands of workers all at once. He fired about two dozen more a few weeks later for allegedly making fun of him in the company’s Slack and then axed some engineers just before Christmas for good measure. 

Don’t worry, though: He’d preemptively snagged some workers from his other companies, including Tesla, to staff up his new venture. Sound familiar? That’s because in a bombshell story last month, Wired reported that some of the DOGE staffers demanding access to sensitive government payment, personnel and security systems were college-aged kids who’d spent a few months working at Neuralink or SpaceX.

Sweeping job cuts have been another signature move. In his first few weeks after acquiring Twitter, Musk reduced the company’s headcount by nearly 4,000 workers (about 50%), with 2,000 more cuts later. Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, the federal workforce has lost likely hundreds of thousands of employees due to DOGE’s efforts, through a combination of rescinded job offers, termination of probationary employees, and outright layoffs and firings, according to the Associated Press. 

Musk titled the messages announcing his demolition efforts the same way: “Fork in the road.” 

In his wake, he’s left similar scars on former partners. With Twitter, it was advertisers fleeing in fear of a coming free speech “hellscape”; with the U.S. government, it’s longtime international allies suddenly hung out to dry. Musk decided to stop paying rent and eventually just abandoned Twitter’s Mid-Market lease, just as DOGE is now pulling out of federal leases across the country. In both situations, he’s had his favored scapegoats: bot accounts on Twitter, “waste and fraud,” and “corruption” in the federal government.

Despite all the similarities, of course, taking over a social media company is not the same as taking over American democracy. Musk could mostly do what he wanted as Twitter’s owner; he did face some employee lawsuits, but ultimately, he overhauled the platform, arguably for the worse, and continued to grow his personal wealth. By rebranding the U.S. Digital Service as DOGE, the Trump administration gave Musk and his team immediate access to virtually every part of the government’s systems, but thanks to the separation of powers, DOGE’s efforts are still being challenged in court left and right. Some of the cuts will be blocked or reversed, which will save some (but not all) jobs and programs.

But it won’t spare Americans the whiplash. 

Last Friday, the New York Times put a finer point on the Bay Area roots of DOGE’s devastation. On Sept. 29, 2023, per the paper, Musk attended a dinner party at the Silicon Valley home of Chamath Palihapitiya, a tech venture capitalist who has invested in Slack, co-hosts a podcast with Jason Calacanis and David Sacks, and was at one point a minority owner of the Warriors.

The event was a fundraiser for Vivek Ramaswamy, then running for president in the Republican primary, but Musk spent it sharpening the vision for what would become DOGE. The world’s wealthiest man reportedly vented about federal oversight of his companies, opined on foreign policy and zeroed in on what he sees as government bloat. He “told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter ... the key was gaining access to the company’s servers,” according to the Times.

“Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?”