Longtime Twitter employee Eric Frohnhoefer was accustomed to the Silicon Valley ethos of respectful disagreement. So when his new boss, Elon Musk, seemed to misidentify why the social media site was running slowly, Frohnhoefer took to the platform to correct the company’s CEO.
Musk’s reaction was swift and definitive. The day after their online disagreement, Frohnhoefer’s computer access was shut off and Musk informed his hundreds of millions of followers of Frohnhoefer’s fate. “He’s fired,” Musk wrote in a now-deleted tweet.
“I’d been laid off before this, but what’s different was the lack of communication and the lack of professionalism,” Frohnhoefer said in an interview with The Washington Post.
The incident illustrates Musk’s boundary-pushing leadership style that he has deployed at his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, now X. But now the billionaire - recast as a “special government employee” at the U.S. DOGE Service - is bringing his unorthodox methods to Washington, where they are clashing with the traditionally staid and steady federal workforce.
Even among hard-driving tech workers, Musk is known to his employees for his unusual and often erratic management tactics: He is eager to cut staff who fail to meet his high expectations, drives workers at a breakneck pace and is quick to broadcast internal company disputes on X and other public forums. Those close to Musk say he obsesses over intricate operational details, often expressing single-minded devotion to pet projects, and is willing to take measures that prompt legal challenges to exact budget cuts and reach his goals.
Despite his unpredictable leadership style, Musk has been hailed as a visionary, whose stringent demands, devotion to trimming margins and feverish work ethic have revolutionized the electric vehicle industry, space travel - and now, potentially the federal government, where he has emerged as de facto boss to roughly 3 million federal workers. Many of his employees revere him for his scrappy mentality, out-of-the-box thinking - and the power, money and clout he brings to his projects.
“There are people in Elon-land who really like working with him … because he is able to get capital and attention and do things that are very experimental,” said one former employee.
The observations of Musk’s work style are drawn from interviews with six people who have worked for the billionaire or are directly familiar with his management style, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution, along with details culled from lawsuits filed against Musk and some of his ventures. Some of the people were fired or laid off by Musk.
Now, as Musk thunders into the White House - drawing a barrage of lawsuits to block his efforts - former employees predict the Silicon Valley billionaire will cause friction as the shadow boss of a federal bureaucracy where many workers trade the higher pay and longer work hours of corporate America for the job security, steadier schedule and employee benefits gained in government work.
“In my experience, he’s going to do everything in a rush - in a hurry,” Frohnhoefer said, “regardless of whether it’s legal or not.”
Musk, Tesla, X and America PAC did not return a request for comment. On Friday, President Donald Trump touted Musk’s work, saying in the Oval Office that “Elon is doing a great job. He’s finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste.”
Aggressive timelines, meticulous management
Musk’s need for speed and then blustering disappointment when his expectations aren’t met have unsettled employees across his companies: He has berated employees publicly and fired workers in tweets or curt emails.
The billionaire brought the same intense management tactics to his political work last year.
Just months before the November election, Musk sat at a dining table in his downtown Austin apartment with political strategists and his personal advisers to outline demands familiar to his corporate employees: intensity, creativity and speed, according to a person familiar with the meeting.
Musk told the group he wanted his recently launched pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, to reach hundreds of thousands of swing-state voters who were either not registered to vote or otherwise disengaged from politics. Members of the group said it would be challenging to meet his high expectations for a political project that would normally require months to properly train and hire the necessary staff. But Musk was unwavering in his vision.
The megadonor was considered unusually hands-on with the PAC, according to two people familiar with the operations. He attended weekly planning sessions on Zoom every Friday, where he was laser-focused on the minutiae of the group’s operations, including how many people had been hired, how many voters had been contacted and how many new people had they registered.
He was so meticulous that he reviewed and offered edits on proposed digital ads and suggested wording tweaks to print materials going out to voters, according to one of the people familiar with the effort. Musk frequently called advisers to demand status reports, according to another person familiar with his interactions.
“He lives and breathes it. He wants to know everything that is going on because he is so determined for success,” said one of the people. “He is like a dog to a bone. Winning the election is the bone and he is just the dog that is chewing.”
Musk ultimately appeared to pull it off: the America PAC was considered one of the most ambitious get-out-the-vote efforts for Trump, reaching thousands of voters in swing states with door-knockers and campaign fliers. The billionaire was hailed by the president as a “new star” in the Republican Party.
“I know every political consultant would love to work for him and prove themselves to him,” said one of the people. “He can fund everything.”
Introducing the 120-hour workweek
When Musk is interviewing job applicants, he poses a simple query: “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.”
“The people that really solved the problem, they know exactly how they solved it,” he said. “They know the little details. And the people that pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level, and then they get stuck.”
In the past two weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, dozens of federal workers have been asked similar questions: Point to a recent “technical win” and explain how it came together. Government technologists have been pressed for specific details on how they arrived at technical solutions.
In Washington, Musk has mirrored his companies’ behavior in other ways, championing the frantic pace of the DOGE team and boasting that staffers “work long hours” to identify and eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse,” according to a post from the agency’s X account.
His small team of advisers have even installed “sleep pods” in government agencies, according to photos on X posted by the sleep pod company co-founder.
“DOGE is working 120 hour[s] a week,” Musk said in an X post at 3:21 a.m. Sunday. “Our bureaucratic opponents optimistically work 40 hours a week. That is why they are losing so fast.”
The expectations are quintessential Musk, who has boasted about sleeping on the factory floor at Tesla and in an office at Twitter.
After taking over Twitter in 2022, Musk issued an ultimatum to current employees, warning that committing to the company “will mean working long hours at high intensity,” according to a memo previously obtained by The Post. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
While his towering expectations across his companies have led to mass layoffs, voluntary resignations or hostile firings, those who stick around often feel a loyalty to a boss with relentless energy and commitment to the job.
“It’s amazing that companies of his size have such a scrappy mentality on how to do things with the bare minimum, with people pulling all-nighters because they believe in the movement,” said Michael Morris, professor of behavioral science at Columbia Business School and author of the book “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.” “Brash and unpredictable are virtues in the tech industry.”
But, Morris said, it’s unclear how that will transfer to the federal workforce, where many staff are used to working 40 hours per week and earning regular, predictable promotions, pay raises and cost-of-living allowances.
Managing on a whim
While meeting with one of X’s advertisers in 2022, Musk suggested sending a tweet recommending the social network restore Trump’s X account, which had been banned after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Jean-Philippe Maheu, a former ad sales executive at the company, cautioned Musk in front of the group about the plan.
After the incident, Musk texted Leslie Berland, the company’s former chief marketing officer, who had recommended Maheu attend the meeting: “JP is not going to work out. Bad recommendation.” A few hours later, both Berland and Maheu were fired. Eighteen days after that, Trump’s account was reinstated.
The anecdote is drawn from legal documents in a severance lawsuit filed by Berland against Musk. Maheu declined to comment. Berland did not respond to a request for comment.
Numerous former workers described Musk’s comfort with quickly and dramatically overhauling business operations, reversing policies he disagrees with and firing people who resist. In some instances, he makes sweeping decisions only to backtrack once they prove damaging.
Last spring, as Tesla sales and profits plummeted, Musk fired roughly 500 employees focused on the company’s vast network of superchargers around the country.
The layoff notice came in the middle of the night while many in the department were asleep, according to a former employee and public statements from others who were impacted. Workers awoke to see their jobs had been cut.
Just a few weeks later, Musk started hiring back some of the laid off employees who were essential to running and expanding the network.
“He manages by whim,” said Morris, the Columbia Business School professor.
As Musk attempts to take a chainsaw to the federal government and its current processes, Morris said the end result could be beneficial to all Americans with a more efficient and streamlined government. But his actions are also likely to cause widespread morale issues across the federal workforce, Morris said.
And in government, he added, “the stakes are a lot higher than at Twitter.”
Razzan Nakhlawi, Alice Crites and Aaron Wiener contributed to this report.