Elon Musk: Government ‘Pulse Check’ Email Was Just to See Who’s Alive and Real

Elon Musk: The email was not a performance review, just a pulse check review.

“To be clear, I think that email perhaps was misinterpreted as a performance review, but actually it was a pulse check review. If you have a pulse and two neurons, you can reply to an email. I think this is not a high bar. Anyone could accomplish this.

We think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can't respond, and some people who are not real people, who are literally fictional individuals, and somebody's collecting paychecks for them.

So, we're literally trying to figure out, are these people real and are they alive? And can they write an email? This is, I think, a reasonable expectation the American public would have for someone in the public sector.”

White House, February 26, 2025