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Sometimes, Trump invited Musk to sleep over in the Lincoln Bedroom. "We'll be on Air Force One, Marine One, and he'll be like, 'do you want to stay over?'" Musk

told reporters. The president made sure he got some caramel ice cream from the kitchen. "This stuff's amazing," Musk said. "I ate a whole tub of it." Looking back

on his experience in government, he described it as a lark. "It is funny that we've got DOGE," an acronym that references an online meme featuring a surprised-looking dog from

Japan. "How did we get here?" Musk did not give federal workers the benefit of the doubt From the beginning, Musk treated federal workers with contempt. At best, they were

inefficient; at worst, they were committing fraud. His team offered them a "fork in the road," meaning they could get paid to quit. Probationary employees, generally people new on

the job without full civil service protection, were shown the door. Anyone who stayed faced escalating demands, such as what became known as the "five things" emails. Musk wanted

every government employee to submit a list of five things they accomplished in the previous week, and he claimed that "failure to respond will be taken as a resignation." Some

administration officials curtailed the plan, concerned that it could jeopardize security in more sensitive areas of the government, and it eventually faded, an early sign of Musk's

struggle to get traction. But in the meantime, he continued issuing orders like thunderbolts. One day in February, Musk posted "CFPB RIP," plus an emoji of a tombstone. The

headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created after the Great Recession to protect Americans from fraud and deceptive practices, was shut down and employees were ordered

to stop working. Musk had already started gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, a pillar of the country's foreign policy establishment and the world's largest

provider of humanitarian assistance. "Spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper," he bragged. Thousands of contacts were cut off, pleasing conservatives who disliked the

agency's progressive initiatives on climate change and gay rights. Musk rejected concerns about the loss of a crucial lifeline for impoverished people around the globe, saying, "no

one has died." However, children who once relied on American assistance perished from malnutrition, and the death toll is expected to increase.