Young professionals gravitating toward government jobs, which have been synonymous with steady employment, might be more disappointed than a frat bro at a dry wedding thanks to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

President-elect Donald Trump tasked the entrepreneur duo with heading a new nongovernmental commission dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), through which Musk and Ramaswamy plan to take a chainsaw to federal spending by rooting out what they deride as government waste and overreach.

The pair says they will slash regulations and fire thousands of bureaucrats who enforce them. The incoming Trump administration is expected to sidestep job protections for federal employees by reclassifying their employment status. As a result, working for the federal government—the largest employer in the country, with over 2 million civilians on its payroll—might start to resemble the roller-coaster grind at a venture-backed startup.

Gen Z might think twice

TikTok was recently flooded by satisfied public servant Gen Zers praising the job security, work-life balance, and remote work flexibility that come with government work in times of frequent tech layoffs and return-to-office mandates:

• Around 7.5% of new college grads have applied to government jobs this year, up from 5.5% last year, according to a survey conducted by the job site Handshake.
• About two-thirds of government jobs currently come with a hybrid work schedule, a privilege that might be wiped out starting in January, as Musk and Ramaswamy have vowed to push for federal employees to work in person full time.

Gen Z bureaucrats are already a rare breed…as only 7% of the civilian federal workforce is younger than 30, while the cohort makes up 20% of the country’s workforce overall. Observers previously voiced concerns over the difficulty of getting youths to fill the positions of retiring workers. Government jobs tend to come with fewer growth opportunities, and the pay is around 10% to 30% less than in comparative private sector roles.—SK

Trump offered Treasury secretary position to Scott Bessent. The founder of the Key Square Capital Management hedge fund won out in a long, competitive process and received the governmental equivalent of the final rose from the president-elect. Shortly after the election, Bessent wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece encouraging President-elect Trump to pursue deregulation and tax cuts in his second term but did not bring up tariffs. Reportedly, Trump liked Bessent’s billionaire status and the fact that he had been the chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund founded by Democratic bankroller George Soros, before Bessent switched to the MAGA movement.

Amazon invests $4 billion more in Anthropic. The everything store has decided it needs more Claude. The deal marks the second time in a year that Amazon has earmarked $4 billion for Anthropic as it seeks to keep pace with its main rival, OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion in October. Anthropic announced that the new funds establish Amazon Web Services as “our primary cloud and training partner,” with Amazon poised to provide AI chips that will help Anthropic develop more complex models. Anthropic’s Claude chatbots have received high marks from users looking to generate text.

Foreign tourists die of suspected poisoning in Laos. Six visitors to the Southeast Asian country, including an American man and two Australian teenagers, have died after reportedly drinking alcohol tainted with methanol, a chemical found in antifreeze. The BBC reported that methanol is a common ingredient in bootleg alcohol because it’s a cheap filler, but less than an ounce of the substance can be lethal. The investigation is ongoing.—HVL

A previously irrelevant X/Twitter alternative is readjusting after its rapid rise to the top (of the free app charts). As of this week, the social platform Bluesky has nearly doubled its users since late October, and its small team of 20 employees has been pulling some all-nighters to keep up, the New York Times reported.

Threads blowing its lead? Though there are only 21+ million accounts on Bluesky (and counting) compared to 275 million on Threads, Bluesky has more active web users than Threads in the US and UK, according to the traffic analyzer Similarweb. Per a recent report:

• Bluesky drew more than 2.5 million daily US visits last week compared to the Meta-owned platform’s ~1 million.
• After 10 months of essentially flat growth, Bluesky app visits skyrocketed 519% in the US and 352% in the UK in the week following the election.

While political tensions may seem like the main driver, other factors are afoot: On Nov. 15, X started letting third parties use its user data to train AI models. In the five days after that, 5 million users joined Bluesky.

Looking ahead…Bluesky might pursue profits by monetizing content and payments, similar to Patreon, Marketing Brew reported. First, it’ll have to address a loophole that’s helped users impersonate famous people.—ML

The newest LinkedIn ragebait wants you to consider: What if you paid a fee in order to work? Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Indian food delivery company Zomato, is in the market for a chief of staff. But instead of receiving a salary, the person in the role will pay 2 million rupees or $23,700 in the form of a donation to the charity Feeding India for a one-year fast-track into the business world.

Goyal framed the paid (?) internship as a better opportunity than a stint at a two-year management school. And if everything works out, he said the staff member would be making at least $60,000/yr by year two on the job.

• In a follow-up post, Goyal said the stunt was “a filter” to find a quality candidate.
• But the original post garnered 2,100+ comments; many called the role exclusionary and unrealistic.

One thing’s for sure: It got a lot of attention, something Goyal and Zomato, which rules the food delivery sphere in India with 58% of the market share, are used to. It doesn’t hurt that the internet discourse storm arrived less than two weeks after the media reported that India’s antitrust body found the company had broken anti-competition laws, which Zomato has denied.—MM

A new survey from financial services company Empower ignited a conversation about what monetary success means. Turns out, it depends on who you ask. Boomers believe that success means having an annual salary of about $100,000. Gen Z thinks your mom can’t brag about you to her dentist until you earn $600k/year. On average, respondents said success is making $270,000 annually.

Additionally, less than 40% of respondents said they considered themselves financially successful. Almost 50% don’t believe they will achieve the level of success they desire. But there was some good news: Forty-three percent said their idea of success didn’t depend on a specific sum of money. And almost 60% said happiness is most important, as long as happiness is defined as “being able to spend money on the things and experiences that bring the most joy.”—HVL