‘I was racist before it was cool,’ wrote Musk staffer, Marko Elez, before resigning from DOGE
A staff member on the Department of Government Efficiency advisory group led by tech billionaire Elon Musk resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to a social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.
The DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, earlier in the day had been approved by a federal judge along with another DOGE staff member to have access to the payment system at the U.S. Treasury, but the judge restricted his ability to share data from the system.
The Journal said it had established links between 25-year-old Elez and a social media account on Musk’s platform, X, that was deleted in December.
“The deleted @nullllptr account previously went by the username @marko_elez, a review of archived posts shows,” the Journal reported. “The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink, where Elez has worked, according to archives of Elez’s personal website.”
Musk is playing a major role in efforts by President Donald Trump to slash federal government spending and employee head count. Elez had been designated as a special government employee.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” @nullllptr tweeted on X in September, the Journal reported.
″‘Normalize Indian hate,’ the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley,” the Journal wrote.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July, according to the newspaper.
In June, the account tweeted, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that Elez resigned after the Journal inquired about the account. [Continue reading…]
Elez works at the Treasury Department, a staffer at the office of the Secretary of Treasury confirmed in a call with a ProPublica reporter. Wired reported Feb. 4 that Elez, who graduated from Rutgers in 2021 and studied computer science, has gained access to the highly sensitive payment systems of the U.S. Treasury Department. According to Elez’s LinkedIn bio, which was recently deleted, he was most recently an engineer at X in New York for roughly a year and an engineer at SpaceX in the Los Angeles area for around three years before that.