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Elon Musk
Elon Musk speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland.
Billionaire Elon Musk has gone on a mass firing spree of federal employees, and Rolling Stone reports he's been immensely enjoying himself while doing so.
According to sources who spoke with the magazine, Musk has regularly “privately messaged associates and confidants about reports from federal staffers about how their lives have been wrecked” and “has been known to react with laugh-crying emojis” to their stories.
Musk's cavalier attitude toward fired federal employees was also confirmed on the record by Ben Vizzachero, a wildlife biologist with the Los Padres National Forest who had been fired by Musk earlier this year.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Vizzachero described an encounter he'd had with Musk after seeing him at President Donald Trump's address before Congress.
“When a Democratic lawmaker invited Vizzachero as a guest to Trump’s joint address to Congress in March, he found himself seated near Musk,” writes Rolling Stone. “He took the opportunity to confront the world’s richest man. According to Vizzachero, he described his job to Musk and asked: ‘Am I waste?’ He says Musk, ‘with a very condescending smirk,’ hit him with a line from the 1999 movie Office Space: ‘What would you say you do here?’”
The Rolling Stone report also outlines the way that even many Trump officials have grown completely fed up with having to deal with Musk on a regular basis.
“Talking to the guy is sometimes like listening to really rusty nails on a chalkboard,” a senior Trump administration official told the publication. “He’s just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that is saying something.”
