MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Millions of federal workers have been receiving emails from a generic government account demanding that they list their weekly accomplishments in five bullet points. The emails tap into a preoccupation of Elon Musk - the idea that dead people or nonexistent people are employed by the federal government. NPR's Bobby Allyn tells us it's not his first chase for phantom employees.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he sent executives on a mission - conduct a payroll audit. Musk wanted to ensure that all of Twitter's employees were real people. He even circulated a list of so-called unaccounted-for Twitter workers.
JAY HOLLER: There's just people collecting paychecks and not doing anything - right? - and, like, as if they don't have supervisors.
ALLYN: That's Jay Holler. He was an engineering supervisor at Twitter when Musk took over. He remembers Musk instructing leadership to dig into the company's payroll and root out fake people, dead people or people getting paid by mistake.
HOLLER: The whole idea is just fundamentally absurd and ignorant of how things actually work.
ALLYN: To former Twitter employees like Holler, Musk's remarks last month to President Trump's Cabinet sounded familiar. Musk described his Department of Government Efficiency effort and promoted his so-called pulse-check review emails to federal workers. Here's Musk during the Cabinet meeting.
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ELON MUSK: We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond, and some people who are not real people. Like, there are literally fictional individuals that are collecting paychecks. Well, somebody's collecting paychecks on a fictional individual. So we're just literally trying to figure out - are these people real, are they alive, and can they write an email?
ALLYN: Former Twitter engineer Yao Yue wasn't so sure about that being the driving force behind the emails. She, too, was working at Twitter when Musk acquired the company. She thinks there's another reason behind Musk's push for the five-bullet-point messages.
YAO YUE: Part of that is making his presence felt very acutely. I'm the boss. I'm now overseeing your work. You better make me happy, right? So just putting it on people's mind.
ALLYN: Yue says Musk showed little tolerance for dissenters at Twitter after his purchase, and she thinks Musk's emails to federal workers are something of a loyalty test.
YUE: It's not so much about commitment to the company - in this case, I guess, commitment to the federal government. It's about a personal commitment to Elon Musk.
ALLYN: Musk and the White House didn't return requests seeking evidence that the federal government has nonexistent people on its payroll. The possibility of dead people receiving Social Security checks has also preoccupied Musk. He said tens of millions of dead people are getting federal support, which isn't true. And while it's hard to know for sure why Musk has made the possibility of ghost workers something of a hobbyhorse, some ex-Twitter employees like Holler say Musk enjoys big performative acts. Holler remembers one moment from some of his final days at the company. He received a message from one of Musk's assistants.
HOLLER: You're scheduled to meet with Elon at 10:30 this morning. Be ready with 50 pages of code.
ALLYN: To check whether Twitter engineers were real or productive, bosses like Holler were told to print out the software code they had recently written.
HOLLER: Well, that's, like, an interesting nerd snipe 'cause, like, we don't think about code in pages. You don't print code out. Like, it's fundamentally run by computers. You edit it on a computer.
ALLYN: In the end, Musk scrapped the idea and never evaluated engineers' printed-out software code. But before he backed away from the plan, the company was - like the whole federal workforce right now - confused, scared and at the unpredictable whim of Elon Musk.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEATMUND NOISE, MARIUSSAX AND NO MIC'S "FEELING ALIVE IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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