Elon Musk is hiring for DOGE. Here's what he's looking for.

  • Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency says it's looking for the "top 1%" of people.

  • DOGE says it'll expect its staff to work 80-plus-hour weeks — a common request of Musk's employees.

  • Musk has had aggressive work expectations for staff at his companies like Tesla and X.

Elon Musk wants you to help root out government waste — but only if you're really smart and willing to work 80 hours a week.

Musk, who's standing up the Department of Government Efficiency — or DOGE, named after a cryptocurrency he's linked to — is looking for the top 1% of people interested in joining.

A post on the department's newly created X account on Thursday said: "We don't need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.

"If that's you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants," it continued, referring to the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who is set to lead the department alongside Musk. (You need an X account to be able to send a direct message; it's not clear whether there will be a traditional application on a website or elsewhere.)

Trump tapped Musk and Ramaswamy this week to lead the new — and unofficial — government department, which the president-elect has said will work to slash regulations and cut government spending.

Musk poured more than $100 million of his own money into getting Trump elected. Now that his efforts have paid off, Musk has made a home for himself in Trump's inner orbit. Musk reportedly joined the president-elect's calls with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last week.

The Tesla CEO is known for working long hours — even sleeping on the floors of Tesla's factory and at Twitter's headquarters.

Since his early days at Tesla, Musk has pushed the company's staff to work "super hardcore" — a management style he mirrored at Twitter, now X, after taking over the platform in 2022.

Musk's aggressive work expectations appeared to have contributed to the mass exodus at Twitter following his takeover.

In a late-night email sent to company employees at the time, Musk said they should work "long hours at high intensity," adding that "only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Musk has said that in his new DOGE endeavor, he'll create a leaderboard displaying the "most insanely dumb" examples of government spending in an attempt to promote "maximum transparency" and allow the public to share feedback.

Several marketing and communications experts previously told Business Insider that such a leaderboard would be likely to get attention, while one game designer argued that it was implicitly biased because of who's defining "waste."

A spokesman for the Trump-Vance transition team, Brian Hughes, said in a statement to BI: "As President Trump has said, Elon Musk is a genius, an innovator, and has literally made history by building creative, modern, and efficient systems."

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