Elon Musk’s DOGE loses key staff member to racist social-media content links

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has not spent a minute out of the spotlight since President Donald Trump entered office. The latest storm to hit the agency is the resignation of a key staff member on the advisory group led by the tech billionaire. 

The staff, whose name is Marko Elez, stepped down from his position on Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his links to a racist social media account. 

The timing of the revelation raises eyebrows 

The revelation of DOGE staffer Marko Elez’s checkered past only happened after he had been approved by a federal judge along with another DOGE staff member to gain access to the payment system in the US Treasury only just earlier in the day. Notably, the judge did not give the DOGE staffers access to share private data from the system.

According to the WSJ, it found links between 25-year-old Elez and an X (formerly Twitter) social media account that was deleted in December. It also shared that a review of archived posts showed the deleted account was previously named @marko_elez.

“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,” the journal’s report read. 

While nobody would like to cover for a racist, the timing of Elez’s secret coming to light intersects with a tumultuous period in the US as Musk’s DOGE continues to clean house in an attempt to cut excess spending. 

Musk has already stepped on many toes as his task force continues to uncover excessive spending and wastefulness that has gone unnoticed under the cover of bureaucracy. DOGE’s actions have been met with mixed reactions, primarily resistance on the part of elected Democrats. 

Elez was colorful and vulgar in his X posts

Elez had been designated as a special government employee, and the statements tied to the account linked to him were quite scathing. 

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” one tweet from September reads. 

“Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote again the same month, alluding to a post noting “the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley,” the Journal reported.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account also reportedly posted in July. In June, there was a tweet that read, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”

According to White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, Elez reportedly resigned after the Journal asked about the account. A White House official has also confirmed the resignation to CNBC.

In an interview with the Bloomberg News service that went live on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed to have personally vetted one of the two Treasury employees from Musk’s DOGE team.

“These are highly trained professionals,” Bessent said. “This is not some roving band running around doing things. This is methodical, and it is going to yield big savings.” 

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