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<\/p>\nNobody likes a Bad Boss. Liberals don\u2019t like Bad Bosses. Conservatives don\u2019t like bad bosses. It\u2019s one of the very few things that unites all of America.<\/p>\n
Well, all of America except for the Bad Bosses themselves.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not talking about angry<\/em> bosses, or strict bosses, or hard-ass bosses, or passive-aggressive bosses, or grumpy bosses who growl at you all day and never seem to have a positive word about anything. Those can all be unpleasant, but they\u2019re not necessarily Bad Bosses. For all their abrasive or even abusive qualities, they may still understand your job and why you do it and they may still allow<\/em> you to do it without getting in the way.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the defining characteristic of Bad Bosses. They do not understand your job and they interfere with your ability to get it done.<\/p>\n In the mind of a Bad Boss it works something like this: I am a boss and, therefore, I am important and what I do is important. You are not a boss, and therefore whatever it is that you do must not be important because you are not important. And therefore I do not need to concern my important self with understanding whatever unimportant thing it is that you do or why our company bothered hiring unimportant people like you to do such unimportant things.<\/p>\n Sometimes it\u2019s fear more than arrogance \u2014 fear that admitting they don\u2019t fully understand the work you do would somehow undermine their \u201cauthority.\u201d But that fear leads them to the same place of dismissive disregard and interference.<\/p>\n It\u2019s that contemptuous disregard and interference that makes Bad Bosses such a nightmare. It doesn\u2019t matter if your job is simple or complex, if it\u2019s humble or prestigious \u2014 you\u2019re doing it because it needs to be done<\/em>. The Bad Bosses who don\u2019t understand that it needs to be done, and who therefore get in the way of getting it done, make it nearly impossible to do your job. And make it entirely impossible to do your job well<\/em>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s infuriating. Apart from pay, the main factor in whether or not people like their jobs is whether or not they know they\u2019re good at them. Most people want to do their jobs well. Bad Bosses prevent them from doing that. And so most people hate Bad Bosses. This is correct and proper and appropriate. It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere, to hate Bad Bosses. This hate is, after all, reciprocal. We hate them because they first hated us.<\/p>\n On Saturday night \u2014 Saturday night<\/em> \u2014 Musk sent an email to every federal employee in every agency of the executive and judicial branch that he could find an email for, asking for \u201c5 bullets\u201d summarizing what they did over the past week.<\/p>\n The email, sent from \u201cHR@opm.gov,\u201d had the subject line \u201cWhat did you do last week?\u201d and the body of it, in its entirety, read:<\/p>\n Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.<\/p>\n Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments.<\/p>\n Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pmEST.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This went to every soldier, sailor, Marine, health inspector, FBI agent, park ranger, marshall, district judge, FDA scientist, trade negotiator, embassy staff, spy, secretary, VA nurse, archivist, cafeteria worker, and astronaut.<\/p>\n The email was preceded by a threat, announced only on Musk\u2019s social media account on Twitter: \u201cAll federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.\u201d<\/p>\n Dumb request followed by angry ultimatum. That\u2019s Bad Boss behavior, but the real clincher is Musk\u2019s revealing use of \u201cunderstand.\u201d He is \u201crequesting to understand\u201d because he absolutely does not understand what anyone in the federal government \u2014 soldier, sailor, Marine, inspector, agent, ranger, etc. \u2014 actually does. Or how or why they do it.<\/p>\n But this \u201crequest for understanding\u201d is also a disrespectful refusal to understand<\/em>. It suggests that whatever unimportant things you unimportant people do could not possibly require more than \u201c5 bullets\u201d to fully describe. And it suggests that upon receipt of these millions of emails he will be, as he is now, fully capable of evaluating the worth and necessity and performance of every single one of those jobs.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just that everyone is already familiar with this exact form of Bad Boss behavior, but that most Americans have personal experience with precisely this Bad Boss move. It\u2019s the time-sucking, time-wasting \u201ctime tracking\u201d that every \u201ccorporate efficiency\u201d consultant introduces with great fanfare and talk of ultimatums before it gets abandoned a few weeks later once even the dimmest of the bosses comes to realize its a massive increase<\/em> in inefficiency.<\/p>\n This, again, is part of the definition of a Bad Boss \u2014 sneering contempt for whatever it is that you do resulting in interference with your ability to do it. This specific form of interference is universally despised and universally recognized as evidence \u2014 as proof \u2014 that the Bad Boss implementing it is not merely a jerk but also completely out of ideas and incapable of coming up with any new ones.<\/p>\n Musk\u2019s status as the Worst of All Bad Bosses was reaffirmed by the apparently deliberate confusion and contradiction sparked by his Saturday night email<\/a>:<\/p>\n By Monday, just 48 hours after an email from Mr. Musk with the subject line \u201cWhat did you do last week?\u201d landed in the email boxes of millions of federal workers, personnel officials proclaimed the \u201crequest\u201d to be voluntary even as Mr. Musk renewed his demand. Many federal workers were left completely confused by the flip-flopping.<\/p>\n Several agencies quickly sent out emails telling their employees they did not need to provide the five bullet points about their activity that Mr. Musk wanted.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no H.H.S. expectation that H.H.S. employees respond to O.P.M., and there is no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond,\u201d said an email sent to employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, referring to the agency that sent Mr. Musk\u2019s request, the Office of Personnel Management.<\/p>\n The Department of Health and Human Services added that anyone who wanted to respond should \u201cassume that what you write will be read by malign foreign actors and tailor your response accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n At virtually the same time that employees were told a response was no longer necessary, Mr. Trump weighed in during a visit with President Emmanuel Macron of France, praising Mr. Musk\u2019s demand as \u201cgenius\u201d and saying that employees who did not respond would be \u201csemi-fired\u201d or \u201cfired.\u201d<\/p>\n Late Monday evening, Mr. Musk offered another twist on his social media site.<\/p>\n \u201cSubject to the discretion of the [p]resident, they will be given another chance,\u201d Mr. Musk wrote, apparently referring to federal employees who did not respond to his email by his original deadline of Monday at midnight. \u201cFailure to respond a second time will result in termination.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That\u2019s not true either, as any such termination \u2014 of a drill sergeant or of a district judge or of a janitor in an office building \u2014 would violate a score of civil service laws written to protect government workers, and the work they do, and to avoid the kind of flagrant corruption that comes from making federal jobs a spoils system for cronies and second-cousins and hunting buddies<\/a>.<\/p>\n But my point here is not that Musk is trampling on laws and the constitutional separation of powers, my point here is that Musk stands fully exposed as a gleeful, proud Bad Boss.<\/p>\n Everyone sees it. And everyone hates it.<\/p>\n \u201cPlease reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.\u201d Everybody<\/em> hates that guy.<\/p>\n Maria Kabas thinks this whole weekend of confusion may have been an act of psychological warfare by Musk and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought<\/a> in pursuit of that plan\u2019s aim to massively reduce the federal workforce by attrition:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2025\/02\/BadBossEmail-300x290.jpg\")
Elon Musk is the archetypal Bad Boss.<\/a><\/p>\n