ON FEBRUARY 22nd Elon Musk posted 158 times on X, his social-media platform. But that was not his only communication. Over the course of that afternoon, a Saturday, all civilian federal employees—some 2.3m people—were sent an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) telling them to reply by midnight on February 24th with “approx” five bullet points listing “what you accomplished last week”, leaving out any classified information. Mr Musk reckons some government employees are doing so little work that “they are not checking their email at all”. Some government workers, in fact, he suggested are not even real people. According to his X posts, any employee who does not reply will be considered to have resigned.