Over the past six weeks, Elon Musk has spent a lot of time tinkering with his newest toy, Twitter. By tinkering, mostly I mean that he’s been poking around and breaking things.

First, he fired most of the senior leaders who knew how things worked. Then, he laid off half of the staff. Next, he asked the remaining staff to pledge to be “extremely hardcore,” or he would consider them as having resigned. Reports suggest that as many as a third of the remaining employees said “No, thanks.”

Finally, he initiated “code reviews” that resulted in more employees being fired because their submissions weren’t up to Musk’s extremely high standard for code screenshots. None of that, however, is quite like what he’s been up to most recently.

Musk spent most of the past week touting the release of what have become known as the Twitter Files. It’s a series of threads by a hand-selected group of journalists releasing internal information about how the company has operated for the past five years.

Those threads include internal emails about policy discussions and decisions about moderating content. They also happened to include the personal email address of a sitting member of Congress, and Twitter’s founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey. That tweet was later deleted.

This weekend, however, Musk sent an email to his remaining employees letting them know that leaking confidential information will not be tolerated. In fact, the wealthiest man in the world says he will sue any employee caught sharing information with the press.

Zoë Schiffer of Platformer was given a copy of the email, excerpts of which she shared on Twitter:

From her thread:

As evidenced by the many detailed leaks of confidential Twitter information, a few people at our company continue to act in a manner contrary to the company’s interests and in violation of their NDA. This will be said only once: If you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when you joined, you accept liability to the full extent of the law & Twitter will immediately seek damages.

Apparently, Musk is cool with leaking internal information only if it serves his own purpose–even if it’s hard to fully understand what that purpose might be.

According to Schiffer, Twitter’s employees also had until 5 p.m. to acknowledge that they understood that it’s very bad to leak and that Musk will be super unhappy with them if they do. The problem is, if the goal is to cultivate loyalty, Musk seems to be going about it all wrong.

To be fair, no boss wants to feel like their employees are working against them, or that they can’t trust their team. If your employees are regularly leaking sensitive information, it’s not surprising that you might be upset.

Also, if those employees signed a non-disclosure agreement when they were hired, they are well aware that they would be expected to keep certain information private. That’s pretty common, especially at tech companies. It’s reasonable that Musk would want to remind employees that it’s not helpful when they disclose information to the press.

The thing is, instead of threatening to sue, you might want to figure out what’s wrong with your company culture. As soon as you play that “I’m going to hold you all legally accountable for making my life more challenging” card, it seems like you’ve lost the argument.

It also seems obvious that Musk has no sense at all of the people who work for him at Twitter. He hasn’t taken the time to understand the culture or earn their trust. Sure, he’s in charge, and he owns the company, but those two things alone don’t build trust.

There’s a reason the people who work at Twitter are leaking information, and it’s because they aren’t on Musk’s team. The thing Musk really wants is loyalty. He wants employees who will carry out his vision and be loyal to him personally. He takes any leak of information as not just a breach of confidentiality, but also as a personal offense.