Elon Musk directed abuse at individual government employees

Elon Musk, among many other things, is now the leader of the now defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Now, before it starts, he’s started singling out individual government employees who he says are the epitome of government bloat and posting them to his hundreds of millions of followers on X.

Earlier this week, as first reported by The Wall Street JournalX user “datahazard” shared a screenshot on X highlighting the role of Ashley Thomas, Director of Climate Change at the US International Development Finance Corporation, saying, “I don’t think the US Taxpayer should be paying to hire” that role. Musk reposted it, adding the comment “so many fake jobs” to the post, which has more than 33 million views.

As i The WSJ notes, Musk’s fans responded as you’d expect: with tons of memes and abuse directed at Thomas, his LinkedIn and Facebook pages are now private. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the media The WSJ that the post is “intended to instill fear and dread in government employees.”

Flood targeted abuse at Musk’s past tactic, including calling Caver Vernon Unsworth a “pedo guy,” criticizing the former Twitter executive following his bid to buy the company, and suggesting that trust and security chief Yoel Roth was sympathetic. in pedophilia. All, of course, under the name of “freedom of speech.”

The next torture, of course, is the point: Musk has turned X into a megaphone to get his ideas across and use that megaphone for whatever purpose he deems funny or useful. Musk and DOGE lead Vivek Ramaswamy have promised to do more of their work in public (and sometimes with X’s vote), too, which means this kind of direct attention is likely to be directed at many other public servants in the near future.