Elon Musk’s DOGE seeks “high-IQ revolutionaries” willing to work 80 hours a week for free
Elon Musk revealed new details Thursday about the workplace culture he plans to build at “DOGE,” joking new advisory group that the President-elect Donald Trump charged with leading an overhaul of the federal government. “We need small government revolutionaries with super high IQs willing to work 80+ hours per week to cut costs ungodly,” the group’s account says. posted on X. “This will be a boring job… and zero pay,” Musk himself added. It is unclear whether he literally meant that his “high-IQ revolutionaries” would not be paid for their services at all.
Either way, the long hours and low pay sound a lot like the working conditions Musk created at X and SpaceX. Some have alleged that the billionaire businessman and Trump supporter is famous for working his employees hard — illegally hard. When he first bought Twitter, now X, in 2022, employees were instructed work “24/7” to meet ambitious deadlines; many are said to have started working 84 hours a week and sleeping in their offices. SpaceX also has it sued constantly about its overtime and break policies, and handle a class action lawsuit with more than 4,000 disgruntled workers in 2017.
Musk himself announced that he would work 120 hours every week—or at least he did before he started spending so much time around with Trump. The president-elect has charged the Department of Government Effectiveness, named after a meme-based cryptocurrency that Musk also invested in, with finding ways to cut up to $2 trillion in spending from the federal government . Economists have warned that such cuts, if implemented in the short term, could jeopardizing basic services and activation broader economic harm—a fact that Musk himself admit.
