The federal government employs around 3 million people.

Let’s assume his email only reached a measly 2/3rds of the workforce, or about 2 million. If all of those workers wasted 10 minutes reading and replying to that crap using generative AI to fluff it up, it would be a combined total of 333k hours wasted.

More realistically, you have far less than 100% of the email recipents replying. But, those that do would probably spend anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes trying to write something they think would let them keep their job. For simplicity sake, let’s just go with a rounded original estimate of 350k hours.

But, how much would that cost? Being charitable to fElon and assuming all those workers were paid federal minimum ($7.50/hour), that’s $2,625,000 worth of worker time at minimum.

How much did that actually cost the government? Close to nothing because the fucker sent it on a weekend and demanded a reply before it would encroach on time they’re actually paid to work for. It’s a fuck-you from the unelected president meant to sew fear and uncertainty and to tell workers that they’re expected to bark when he says so.