Elon Musk revealed new details Thursday about the workplace culture he plans to build at “DOGE,” the jokey new advisory group that President-elect Donald Trump has charged with leading a federal government overhaul. “We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” the account for the group posted on X. “This will be tedious work … & compensation is zero,” Musk himself added. It’s not clear if he literally meant his “high-IQ revolutionaries” would go entirely unpaid for their services.
Either way, the long hours and low pay sound awfully like the work conditions Musk created at X and SpaceX. The billionaire entrepreneur and Trump megabacker has a reputation for working his employees hard—illegally hard, some have alleged. When he first bought Twitter, now X, in 2022, employees were instructed to work “24/7” to meet ambitious deadlines; many reportedly began logging 84-hour work weeks and sleeping in their offices. SpaceX has also been sued repeatedly over its overtime and break policies, and settled one class-action lawsuit with more than 4,000 disgruntled workers in 2017.
Musk himself claims to work 120 hours each week—or at least he did before he began spending so much time palling around with Trump. The president-elect has charged the Department of Government Efficiency, named for a meme-based cryptocurrency that Musk is also invested in, with finding ways to cut as much as $2 trillion in spending from the federal government. Economists have warned that such cuts, if attempted in the short-term, could jeopardize basic services and trigger wider economic harms—a reality that Musk himself acknowledged.
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