Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chief Elon Musk said that his email asking federal employees to list five things they did at their jobs was a “pulse check.”

“Mr. Musk, about half of the government employees so far appear to have responded to your request for what they have been doing over the past week. Is there a timeline in place for people being fired?” a reporter said to the Tesla and Space X CEO.

“It was a pulse check review,” the CEO responded. “You can reply to an email if you have a pulse. I think that’s not a high bar. This is something anyone can accomplish.”

“What we are trying to get to the bottom of—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—some of these paychecks are going to fictional individuals,” Musk said.

“We are trying to figure out: Are these people real? Are they alive? Can they write an email? I think that is a reasonable expectation the American public would have,” he said.

“Mr. Musk, roughly a million employees have responded so far to this email. Does that mean the remaining one million federal employees risk being terminated? Is it your understanding and expectation that when you post a directive on X, the cabinet secretaries will follow that order? Several agencies have instructed employees that responding is voluntary, or they have told them not to respond,” the reporter said.

“Well, I guess last week the president encouraged via Truth Social to be more aggressive. I was like, ‘OK. Yes, sir, Mr. President. We’ll do that,’” Musk responded.

“I do what the president asks. I said, ‘Can we send out an email to everyone asking what they got done last week?’ The president said, ‘Yes.’ So we did that. And we’ve had a partial response,” the CEO said.

“We are going to send another email. Our goal is not to be capricious or unfair. We want to give people every opportunity to send an email. The email can simply say, ‘What I’m working on is too classified to describe.’ That would be sufficient. I think this is just common sense,” he said.