We’re living in unprecedented times. Since Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk has been given carte blanche to reshape the federal government as he sees fit via the newly-established Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE).
His team has set up ostensibly illegal servers at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — which essentially functions as the Federal Government’s “HR”. This has given them direct access to federal personnel records, despite the fact that his team is unvetted, inexperienced, and lacks proper security clearances. More broadly, Musk and his team have already compromised the data of and severely disrupted 15 government agencies, ranging from the Department of Education to the Department of Veterans Affairs. They made a blanket offer to federal employees to resign in exchange for functionally 8 months pay as severance, without any oversight from Congress (although a judge has temporarily blocked the move).
Elon Musk, Trump, and their supporters have justified this striking, haphazard, and unprecedented attack on the federal government as necessary to reduce waste and inefficiency. They’ve leveraged old tropes about “lazy” and “unproductive” federal workers to justify cutting the federal workforce (~25% of whom are veterans). Musk has even openly derided their work ethic:
But is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? I have detailed in multiple articles that he spends an inordinate amount of time on Twitter. His Twitter obsession would be unhealthy and unproductive for anyone, let alone a man who claims to run 3+ companies, has 10+ kids, and also mains a high-level character in the video game Path of Exile 2.
Let’s take a look at his 2025 Twitter usage given his additional role as head of DOGE on top of everything else and in the wake of his continued attacks on “lazy” federal workers.
Key Takeaways (click to skip to that section):
- Elon Musk tweets nearly 100 times a day.
- Elon Musk tweets ~36.1 times during the typical workday.
- I estimate that Elon Musk spends ~3.2 hours on Twitter daily.
Daily Tweets
As of September 2024, I detailed that Musk was averaging ~67.8 tweets per day. Somehow, it’s gotten worse in 2025.
You read that right. Since the beginning of 2025, Elon Musk has averaged nearly 100 tweets a day, with a mean of 93.8 tweets/hr and median of 97.5 tweets/hr. That’s over 5 tweets per hour, assuming he sleeps 6 hours a day. His most prolific days tend to be weekdays, which makes his attacks on “unproductive” federal workers all the more absurd and hypocritical.
When does Musk tweet?
Fortunately, my data contains the timestamp of Musk’s tweets. We can use this to look when in the day Musk tweets.
However, using a singular timezone for this analysis would be woefully inaccurate. After all, Elon Musk is a wealthy man who travels a lot. A Tweet with a 12pm EST timestamp could have been posted at 11am if Musk was in Texas, where Tesla is headquartered.
Luckily, the amazing Jack Sweeney maintains a tracker of Musk’s location based on his private jet. We can leverage this tracker to adjust Musk’s tweet timestamps to the time when he actually wrote said tweets. For this chart, we look at weekdays only, as that’s when time of day is most relevant.
During the traditional 9am-6pm American workday, Elon Musk tweets ~36.1 times on average. That’s over four tweets per hour. All the while, he is constantly villifying federal workers as “lazy” and “unproductive”.
How much time does Musk spend on Twitter?
We can also use these tweet timestamps to do some basic, back-of-the-envelope analysis to estimate how long he spends on Twitter each day.
To start, I note that a lot of Musk’s tweets consist of a single emoji or word reaction. So let’s assume that Musk spends just 15 seconds before and after each one of those tweets: 15 seconds reading whatever he’s reacting to, and then 15 deciding which emoji/word to post. For all remaining tweets greater than 1 word or emoji, let’s assume that he spends 2 minutes before and after each Tweet: two minutes crafting the tweet and two minutes afterwards reading replies. I also eliminate “overlapping” periods to avoid any “double counting” of time.
I think this analysis and the assumptions baked into it are very conservative. It assumes that he is only on Twitter when he’s posting, and ignores all the time he must spend scrolling to find the content that he reacts to. If you measured my time on Reddit by my commenting habits only, you’d…. sorely underestimate it.
That’s all to say that we can think of this as a bare minimum glimpse at how much time Elon Musk spends on Twitter. This chart looks at all days, not just workdays like the previous chart.
That’s right. Even with this conservative analysis, I estimate that Elon Musk spends ~3.2 hours a day on Twitter. Eight of his top 10 most active days in 2025 have been weekdays (read: workdays).
Conclusion
Elon Musk is a massive hypocrite with seemingly out-of-control Twitter habits. That’s really the only conclusion one can draw from this analysis.
Elon Musk tweets nearly 100 times a day, and ~36.1 times during the workday on average. A conservative analysis estimates that he spends ~3.2 hours a day on Twitter. In my humble opinion, he has no right to criticize federal workers and their work ethic. No one who spends this much time on social media can comment on anyone’s work ethic or productivity.
Thanks for reading. I plan for this to be part of a series of posts on Elon Musk’s tweeting habits. I hope to focus my next post(s) on the alt-right connections of accounts that Musk interacts with on a regular basis. If you’re interested in reading that when it comes out (or anything else I write), please subscribe below.