I Would Like to Buy the FBI Headquarters From Elon Musk
The federal government may or may not be contemplating the sale of federal courthouses, the FBI headquarters, and even Main Justice.
I recently finished Character Limit, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s excellent account of how Elon Musk allowed Twitter to so thoroughly cook his brain with stupid right-wing memes that he finally decided to pay $44 billion to buy the platform outright and run it into the ground. Among the book’s more striking throughlines, beyond its oblique references to Musk’s mercurial disposition, is how many of his strategies for dismantling the government are borrowed from his takeover of Twitter, from the “fork in the road” email to federal employees, to the mandate that they return to offices that may or may not have wifi, to his darkly funny habit of firing people and then, upon learning the hard way that they performed an essential job he didn’t understand, immediately scrambling to hire them again.
Even Musk’s reported fixation with “ghost employees”—ostensibly nonexistent workers who are nonetheless drawing a paycheck—is ripped from the same playbook: Before Musk agreed to distribute vested equity awards to Twitter employees he hoped to lay off, he required bewildered HR staffers to verify that everyone set to get paid was, in fact, a real person. Per Conger and Mac, the company’s chief accounting officer had to work late into the night to fulfill Musk’s demand, “pestering managers to reach out to each of their employees and confirm their existence and reiterating impatiently that no, he wasn’t joking.”
The latest Twitter stunt to make an encore appearance in Washington is Musk’s obsession with cutting real estate costs, which manifested earlier this week in a list of some 440 “non-core” federal properties to be put up for sale soon. Among the more prominent entrants are the headquarters of the FBI, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Justice, which prompted lawyers for every awful apartment behemoth in D.C. to quickly prepare bids to buy Main Justice at auction and turn it into overpriced studios without in-unit laundry. As friend of the site Luppe Luppen noted, the list also included at least eight federal courthouses scattered across the country, which raises the extremely funny possibility of life-tenured judges getting forced to cram their chambers into shared flex offices in the not-so-distant future.
Alas, the Trump administration pulled the list hours after it went live, after discovering, according to CNN, that it “mistakenly included federal buildings the administration does not want to sell.” (Perhaps among them: a sprawling warehouse complex in suburban Virginia that, per reporting from WIRED, also includes a classified CIA facility.) But the General Services Administration says a modified list is “coming soon,” presumably whenever someone manages to convey to Musk that, for example, selling a literal power plant that provides heat to dozens of the federal buildings in downtown Washington is probably not an “efficient” use of public resources.
Anyway, if the cretins running the government eventually decide to put the FBI headquarters on the market after all, please be ready to donate to my Kickstarter campaign to fund its acquisition. If my bid is accepted, I will turn half the building into batting cages, and preserve the other half as office space that I will lease to the FBI at exorbitant rates as soon as Musk figures out that the Bureau probably shouldn’t be operating out of a WeWork.
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