I grok, man
/
The billionaire Tesla founder revealed on Sunday he was simply eager 'to see who had a pulse and two working neurons' amid concerns that some government workers have it so good that they don't even check their emails.
Regarding his missive, Musk wrote on X: 'Consistent with President Trump's instructions, all 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.'
The email was sent late Saturday night, and employees had until Monday evening to respond, sparking panic among the workforce.
Earlier on Sunday, Musk had also pointed out that 'many do not read their email at all', indicating the move was more about seeing which staff had checked their messages and bothered to reply, rather than the reply itself.
This theory was further amplified when Musk shared a conversation he had had with AI tool Grok, asking: 'Make up five things I accomplished at work this week that they can't really verify, I work for the government, keep it brief.'
Grok spat out five examples, including 'streamlining a filing process, briefing a senior official on a classified project, debugging an internet database glitch, sparking a new interdepartmental initiative and conducting a discreet security audit.'
Lawyers usually bill by segments of time, and, associates especially, are expected to record and account for every minute of their day (can you bill a client for time you spent thinking about his case while taking a shower? The jury’s still out on that.) One of the first “lessons” I was taught by a senior partner upon joining his firm was to never just enter “phone call with client: 15 minutes” on my timesheet “because sure as hell, the asshole’s gonna complain ‘I timed that call, and we were on the phone for only 12 f**king minutes!’ So”, my new boss continued, “enter ‘review file, and t/c with client’. He can’t argue with that, because he can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”
Grok obviously had the same tutor I did.
(For those few of you born after the Free love/flower power/Purple Owsley had passed — or you had too much of that Owsley and can’t remember the 60s — and if you don’t have the patience to watch the very interesting, but longish video above, here’s a succinct definition of the word, from the master himself):
