Billionaire Elon Musk said sending an email asking more than two million civil servants to report to work by February 24 was to check whether they “exist” in the system or not.

Elon Musk, the White House “special employee” and assigned by President Donald Trump to be in charge of the Office of Government Efficiency (DOGE), admitted on February 24 that the campaign of sending emails to more than two million federal government employees, asking them to report their work done in the past week in five bullet points, was actually a way for DOGE to track down “non-existent” positions.

“It’s simply a way for me to check if the employee is alive, and if they have the capacity to respond to an email,” Musk responded to a post on X, which called DOGE’s idea of ​​requiring civil servants to report their work “sensational” and “silly,” since they are incapable of reading the entire response email.

Musk also claimed that DOGE does not need to use LLM, an artificial intelligence technology that processes big data in language, to receive and process email responses.

His statement contradicts an internal memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) leaked to NBC just hours earlier that said DOGE would use LLM to determine whether each civil servant’s job was important or not.

Billionaire Elon Musk swings a chainsaw at a CPAC event in Maryland on February 20. Photo: AP

“This mess will be resolved this week. Many people are about to wake up and face the bitter truth. They don’t understand it yet, but they will,” Musk wrote.

In a series of posts on X on February 23-22, Musk also described the DOGE email campaign as a “basic pulse check,” to see if federal employees “have at least two active neurons.”

He also retweeted a post by US President Donald Trump on the social network Truth Social, which included a screenshot of the billionaire himself as a model and using X’s AI Grok3 to falsify his work report.

Musk said DOGE set very low work requirements, but was “extremely concerned that some civil servants were complaining that it was too much.”

The “mess,” as Musk put it, began on February 22, when the billionaire announced on X that all federal employees would receive an email asking them to report for work that week, with a deadline of 11:59 p.m. on February 24.

He threatened that those who did not respond would be considered to have resigned, although a subsequent email from OPM did not mention this threat.

However, a series of leaders of US government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy and the US Department of Justice all asked their employees not to respond to emails following OPM’s “ultimatum”.

Meanwhile, some agencies, such as the Department of Health and the Department of Transport, still require employees to submit email reports.

Transport Minister Sean Duffy said that if employees do not list five tasks they are working on, they “probably should not continue working”.

Protesters support the US federal workforce on Capitol Hill, Washington, February 11. Photo: Reuters

An OPM spokesperson told the Independent that “each agency will decide its own next steps” after receiving email responses from employees, while two sources familiar with the matter told NBC that OPM issued a statement explaining that it is up to civil servants to decide whether to report to work as requested by DOGE.

The chaos surrounding Elon Musk’s ultimatum appears to be far from over, as President Trump announced his support for the DOGE leader’s initiative on February 24.

Speaking in the Oval Office while hosting French President Emmanuel Macron, Mr. Trump said Musk’s idea was “a great initiative to check whether civil servants go to work or not, or even if they are aware that they are working for the government.”

“If that person doesn’t respond to emails, they’re about to be fired. Or they’re probably already fired. In many cases, they don’t respond because they don’t exist,” Trump said.

On the night of February 24, shortly before his deadline, Musk wrote on X that he would give federal workers “a second chance” at the behest of President Trump, but did not set a new deadline for more than two million people to report their work results.

“If you don’t respond a second time, you will be terminated,” Musk said.