'Sowing terror and fear': World’s richest man accused of doxxing federal employees
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — who has a net worth of more than $326 billion — is now being criticized for allegedly using his platform as the owner of X to harass private citizens who work for the federal government, according to CNN.
As CNN reported on Wednesday, Musk has idenitified several rank-and-file federal workers in reposts to his social media platform, where he has more than 200 million followers. While these workers are listed in a public database, Musk has retweeted accounts mentioning employees' full names, official titles and the cities where they live to his army of followers as part of his goal of recommending steep budget cuts to federal agencies.
"I don’t think the US taxpayers should pay for the employment of a ’Director of Climate Diversification (she/her)’ at the US International Development Finance Corporation," read one tweet Musk amplified that included a screenshot of the worker's name and city.
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And according to a Wall Street Journal report from last week, one account that Musk retweeted mentioned a federal worker by name with the text: "So many fake jobs" and a threat that read: "Gravy train is over." That woman has since gone dark on social media and deactivated her accounts.
Everett Kelley, who is president of the American Federation of Government Employees union that represents more than 800,000 of 2.3 million federal workers, said Musk's actions can have a chilling effect.
“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” Kelley told CNN. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”
Mary "Missy" Cummings, who is a computer science professor at George Mason University, clashed with Musk in the past when she worked for the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration. She opined that Musk's public harassment of government workers is “his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next.'"
READ MORE: NASA chief worried Musk may have shared sensitive national security info in calls with Putin
Both Musk and billionaire pharmaceutical investor Vivek Ramaswamy are co-chairing an advisory board with the task of firing thousands of federal employees. In an op-ed for the Journal, the two wrote that their mission was to achieve "regulatory rescissions" and "administrative reductions." Many of the regulations the two hope to gut police industries where the two men have vested financial interests.
Click here to read CNN's report in full.
