“Super high-IQ revolutionaries” who are willing to work 80+ hours a week are being urged to join Elon Musk’s new cost-cutting department in Donald Trump’s incoming US government.

The X and Tesla owner will co-lead the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

And in a post on X, the official DOGE account put out a call to arms for people to sign up and help “dismantle government bureaucracy”.

The post said: “We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE.

“We don’t need more part-time idea generators.

“We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.

“If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”

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In a reply to an interested party, Mr Musk suggested the lucky applicants would be working for free.

“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lost of enemies & compensation is zero,” the world’s richest man wrote.

“What a great deal!”

When announcing the new department, President-elect Donald Trump said Mr Musk and Mr Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.

Mr Musk has previously made clear his desire to see cuts to “government waste” and in a post on his X platform suggested he could axe as many as three-quarters of the more than 400 federal departments in the US, writing: “99 is enough.”

At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.

A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.

They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.

Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.

The residence is home to 82 elderly residents.

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The blaze started in one of the rooms, Fernando Beltran, the national government’s top official in the region, told reporters.

All of the victims were elderly residents, he added.

Fire crews, paramedics and police officers remain on site, said a spokesperson for the regional government of Aragon who confirmed the fatalities.

It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the blaze, they said.

The cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated.

UN climate talks are “no longer fit for purpose” and should only be hosted by countries who are trying to give up fossil fuels, veterans of the process have said.

An open letter to the United Nations, signed by former UN chief Ban Ki-moon, made a dramatic intervention in the 29th COP climate summit, under way in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Frustration over petrostate hosts – following last year’s summit in UAE – as well as the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, prohibitive costs, and slow progress have been mounting in recent years.

The letter acknowledges the strides COPs have made on ramping up climate policies.

“But it is now clear that the COP is no longer fit for purpose,” the authors said.

“Its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.”

The letter’s 22 signatories also include former Ireland President Mary Robinson and Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN climate body (UNFCCC) that runs the annual COP summits.

It called for the process to be streamlined and for countries to be held accountable for their promises.

Sky News analysis has found only “marginal” progress has been made since the “historic” pledge from COP28 last year to transition away from fossil fuels.

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The letter also called for “strict eligibility criteria” for host countries to exclude those “who do not support the phase out/transition away from fossil energy”.

This year’s host country, petrostate Azerbaijan, has been engulfed in controversy.

Its authoritarian president Ilham Aliyev used his opening address to criticise western hypocrisy and praise oil and gas as a “gift” from God. His criticism of France, with whom relations have long been tense, drove the French minister to cancel a trip to the summit.

While the government and its COP team run separate operations, host countries are supposed to smooth over disagreements and find consensus between the almost 200 countries gathered.

COP presidencies are also nominating themselves to be climate leaders and throwing their own countries under the spotlight.

Azerbaijan is a small developing country that relies significantly on oil and gas revenues. But it has made slow progress on building out clean power – getting just 1.5% of its energy from clean sources – and led a harsh crackdown on critics in the run up to the COP.

In an interview with Sky News on Sunday, its lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev was unable to say whether Azerbaijan preferred to extract all its oil and gas or seek another, cleaner economic pathway – hard though that would be.

In a news conference yesterday, Mr Rafiyev said the president had been “quite clear” and he would not comment further.

“We have opened our doors to everybody,” he added.

Some diplomats here have hinted that Azerbaijan’s presidency team mean well but might be a little out of their depth. They have never been out in front at previous COPs, but they also only had a year to prepare for their turn hosting the mighty summit.

“My sense of this is that they’re a little underprepared, a little overwhelmed and a little bit short,” said one, speaking anonymously, as is customary for diplomats trying to maintain good relations.

“But I’m not sure that that’s politics. It might just be bandwidth and preparation and things like that.”

Different regions in the world take turns to host a COP. This year it was up to Eastern Europe, but the selection process took longer than usual due to tensions over Russia’s war in Ukraine and between Azerbaijan and rival Armenia.

Achim Steiner of the UN Development Programme, called it “troubling” that some countries face questions over their host roles.

“Are there countries that are by definition good hosts and others are bad hosts?” he asked.

“In the United Nations, we maintain the principle of every nation, first of all, should have a right to be heard.

“Labels are not always the fairest way of describing a nation. Some of the largest oil producers have hosted this COP in the past, and seemingly this seemed to be a perfectly acceptable phenomenon.”

COP stands for “conference of the parties” and refers to countries (“parties”) who have signed the underlying climate treaty.

Azerbaijan’s COP29 team and the UN’s climate body have been contacted with a request to comment.