Well, here we go again. Elon Musk is taking another page out of his Twitter take-over by requiring federal employees to list five things that they did this week or be fired. That’s what he did at Twitter. 

First of all, federal employment doesn’t work that way. Federal employees can only be fired “for cause,” and most of them are protected by either civil service laws or union contracts. They can’t be fired because they didn’t respond to an email from someone who is not in their chain of command.

But more significantly, comparing the federal government to Twitter is like comparing an ocean liner to a bicycle. Just because you can ride a bicycle doesn’t mean that you can pilot an ocean liner.

On top of which, Musk’s stewardship of Twitter has been spectacularly unsuccessful, from a financial perspective. As of 2024, X (formerly Twitter) reported approximately $2.7 billion in revenue and $1.25 billion in adjusted earnings.However, this represents a significant decline from the $4.4 billion in revenue reported in 2022, prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition. The platform has faced other challenges, including a substantial decrease in advertising revenue and a decline in overall valuation. Estimates suggest that X’s value has decreased by approximately 79% since the acquisition. While specific net loss figures for 2024 are not publicly disclosed because it is  now a private company, the available data indicates that X has experienced significant losses, and that the company is being propped up by Musk’s wealth from other companies.

The former boy genius has been reading way too many of his own press releases, and now thinks he has the answers to everything, when he doesn’t even have the answer for Twitter.

Trump, for his part, barely knows any more about how the federal government works, and is running the country like he did his businesses, which (in case anybody forgot) had to declare bankruptcy six times.

Once Trump runs this country into the ground, maybe we can finally be done with the hopelessly incorrect and demonstrably false assumption that the government should be run like a business.

To use another analogy, that’s like saying a ski resort should be run like a shopping center. The two have nothing to do with each other.