Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers. ‘A Tough Way to Find Out She’s Losing Her Job.’

Story by Jim Carlton, Rebecca Ballhaus. November 22, 2024.

Elon Musk Doxing1 Federal Employees Is A Fucking Dangerous Tactic!

Musk claims that X/Twitter supports free speech, but after buying X/Twitter, he closed the @ElonJet account because that threatens his personal safety.

Guess what Musk! You’re doing the same damn thing!

  • Musk’s Criticism: Elon Musk, co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency, has been targeting specific federal employees on X, leading to online harassment.
  • DOGE Initiative: Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are leading an initiative to reduce government spending and regulations, proposing drastic measures like mass layoffs.
  • Public Backlash: Musk’s actions have sparked significant backlash, with critics arguing that his tactics instill fear among federal employees.
  • Highlighted Case: Ashley Thomas, a federal employee, became a target of Musk’s followers after he questioned her role, leading to widespread ridicule and threats.

As co-director of President-elect Donald Trump’s nascent Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has wasted no time posting to his 205 million followers on X about specific government departments he views as bloated.

But this week, Musk has escalated from targeting government agencies to singling out individuals—sparking his online army of followers to launch blistering, critiques of ordinary federal employees.

One recent post by the billionaire zeroed in on Ashley Thomas, a little-known director of climate diversification at the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., after another user on Musk’s social-media platform X questioned her role.

Musk’s repost—“So many fake jobs”—garnered 32 million views, triggering an avalanche of memes and ridicule from his followers against the employee, such as, “Sorry Ashley Thomas Gravy Train is Over.”

Earlier this month, in a move heralded by many of his supporters, Trump tapped Musk and biotech-company founder Vivek Ramaswamy to spearhead DOGE—sharing its name with a Musk-promoted cryptocurrency—to slash spending, regulations, and restructure federal agencies.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece Wednesday, the two men envisioned “mass head-count reductions” across the federal bureaucracy. On Wednesday, Musk shared on X a past TV interview with Milton Friedman in which the economist recommended the elimination of a number of federal agencies, including the departments of education, commerce, agriculture and housing and urban development. “Milton Friedman was the best,” Musk said in apparent agreement.

Ramaswamy in interviews has offered an unusually blunt—and likely impossible to implement—strategy for how to slash the federal workforce: firing those whose Social Security numbers start or end with odd numbers. “Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done,” he said on a podcast interview this fall.

Both leaders have since called out numerous instances of alleged government waste on X, soliciting public recommendations for budget cuts.

This week, Musk resumed his controversial practice of calling out individuals—a tactic going back to X’s previous incarnation as Twitter.

In 2021, Musk took aim Mary “Missy” Cummings, a Duke University engineering professor who was appointed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as a top adviser, and had been critical of Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance system.

After taking over Twitter in 2022, Musk targeted Yoel Roth, the platform’s former head of trust and safety, who had recently left. Musk tweeted, incorrectly, that it looked like Roth had argued “in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services.” Some of the platform’s users interpreted it as Musk calling Roth a pedophile, and they posted calls for Roth’s death. Roth moved out of his house temporarily because of threats, the Journal reported at the time.

Musk’s targets this week included Alexis Pelosi, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s relative and a senior climate adviser at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But that post also included the names of two obscure federal officials with climate-related jobs—including one who had actually left her job at the Energy Department in August.

“These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 800,000 of the 2.3 million civilian federal employees. “It’s intended to make them fearful that they will become afraid to speak up.”

Kelley said Musk is going after the wrong target if he focuses only on federal employees. Kelley said far more is spent by federal contractors such as himself—$750 billion annually compared with about $200 billion for the civilian workforce, one third of which are veterans as he is.

“We are a comparative steal, and we want to help clean it up too,” said Kelley, a former Army sergeant. “The people I represent have been called names like deep state, but they are working people just like you and I.”

The 37-year-old Thomas, the target of Musk’s viral repost, works for a federal agency that partners with private companies to finance ways to improve living standards in developing countries.

With engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford, Thomas spent years doing field work in Africa and writing research papers such as one on a technology that can help extract water from air in arid countries, according to her past tweets.

She eventually went to work as the agency’s director of climate diversification in 2023, when federal personnel records show she earned $172,075 a year.

An agency official said the climate diversification portfolio is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.

Thomas previously had served stints in various small companies and nonprofits, some of which do work in the developing world, according to her online resume.

How does a routine federal employee come to the attention of Musk, the world’s richest man?

The controversy erupted when “datahazard,” an X user whose anti-Biden posts have drawn Musk’s attention, questioned Thomas’s job on Tuesday to nearly 170,000 followers.

Musk’s repost sparked a barrage of taunts, with his followers making jeers such as, “A tough way for Ashley Thomas to find out she’s losing her job.”

Michael Skolnik, a longtime civil rights activist, was among those who fired back at the post. “You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about and dangerously targeting a person who works an honest job to provide for their family.”

Neither Musk nor his representatives responded to requests for comment.

A representative of the “datahazard” X account, who didn’t give a name, said it was legitimate to give names of employees like Thomas because she is on a list of senior officials who are public figures. “Taxpayers have a fundamental right to know who runs our government,” this person said via a direct message on X.

LinkedIn and Facebook pages for Thomas, who lives in the Seattle area, were no longer live as of Wednesday.

  1. dox – Merriam-Webster’s definition:
    verb
    \ ˈdäks <br />variants: or doxx
    doxed or doxxed; dox​ing or dox​xing; dox​es or dox​xes
    Definition
    transitive ​verb
    informal
    : to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge
    //… Facebook, like other platforms, wants to prevent users from being doxed or otherwise targeted for harassment …
    — Karissa Bell
    //On general principles, I support Internet anonymity and look askance at people’s efforts to “out” or “dox” anonymous Web commenters whose views they disagree with, much less for simple sport.
    — Damon Poeter
    //This isn’t the first time the LAPD has been doxxed. In 2011, a group affiliated with the online hackers Anonymous claimed responsibility for posting personal information of more than 40 officers, including their home addresses, campaign contributions, property records, and names of family members after they claimed the LAPD oppressed them by shutting down the Occupy L.A. Movement.
    — Christine Pelisek
    Other Words
    doxing or doxxing noun, plural dox​ings or dox​xings informal
    //They were doxed when an anonymous Wikipedia user edited their pages. The information was quickly removed after the doxing was discovered and aides contacted authorities.
    — Alex Horton and Reis Thebault
    //… “doxxing”—the term used for the troll harassment technique of finding and then posting a user’s sensitive personal information, including addresses, phone numbers, and even Social Security numbers.
    — Harry Bruinius
    //The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Cyber Crimes Unit began investigating a pattern of doxxings and harassing phone calls that targeted the employees, authorities said.
    — Chris Sheldon
    First Known Use
    2009, in the meaning defined above
    History and Etymology
    respelling of docs, plural of doc (short for document entry 1), verbal derivative based on earlier dropping docs, doc-dropping, etc., describing the same act ↩