Elon Musk’s DOGE is looking for ‘high IQ revolutionaries’ who want to work 80 hours a week for free

Elon Musk revealed new details on Thursday about the workplace culture he wants to build at ‘DOGE’, the Just kidding new advisory group for the president-elect Donald Trump has charged leading an overhaul of the federal government. “We need small-government revolutionaries with super-high IQs who are willing to work 80+ hours a week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” the group’s report said. posted about X. “This will be tedious work… and the compensation is zero,” says Musk himself added. It is not clear whether he literally meant that his “high IQ revolutionaries” would go completely unpaid for their services.

Either way, the long hours and low wages sound an awful lot like the working conditions Musk created at X and SpaceX. The billionaire entrepreneur and Trump megabacker has a reputation for making his employees work hard — illegally hard, some claim. When he first bought Twitter, now X, in 2022, employees were instructed to do so work “24/7” to meet ambitious deadlines; Many reportedly began logging 84-hour work weeks and sleeping in their offices. SpaceX has that too indicted repeatedly about its overtime and break policies, and organized one class action lawsuit involving more than 4,000 disgruntled employees in 2017.

Musk himself claims to work 120 hours every week – or at least before he started spending so much time there hang out with Trump. The president-elect has charged the Department of Government Efficiency, named after a meme-based cryptocurrency in which Musk is also an investor, with finding ways to cut as much as $2 trillion in federal government spending. Economists have warned that such cuts, if attempted in the short term, could endangering basic services and trigger broader economic damage– a reality that Musk himself has recognized.