Marko Elez, 25, who was assigned by DOGE to examine federal spending, quit when The Wall Street Journal questioned the White House about his involvement with the deleted social media account.
According to The Wall Street Journal, a key employee of Elon Musk’s newly established Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, under US President Donald Trump, resigned on Thursday due to racist social media remarks, including ones that were critical of India. According to the story, Marko Elez, 25, who was assigned by DOGE to examine federal spending, quit when The Wall Street Journal questioned the White House about his involvement with the deleted social media account.
According to the WSJ’s analysis of old posts, the account said in July, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
The account stated on X in September, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” The same month, the account wrote, “Normalise Indian hate,” in response to a piece highlighting the large number of Indians in Silicon Valley. Elez later resigned from his position, according to White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. Elez has also been at the focus of a court dispute in recent days regarding access to private taxpayer data and the technologies that the Treasury Department employs to handle trillions of dollars’ worth of payments every year.
On the day Elez departed, a US District Court judge also decided that he may continue to access the department’s payment systems, but limited his ability to disseminate the data. Elez attended Rutgers University and majored in computer science. In order to help high school students find mentors who could help them polish their college applications, he co-founded Unimetrics.io. According to Elez’s personal website archives cited by the WSJ, Elez worked for Musk at SpaceX, where he worked on its Starlink satellites, and X, where he concentrated on artificial intelligence.
In addition to owning X and SpaceX, Musk also owns Tesla. He recently expressed support for hiring people with H-1B visas, declared that he “will go to war” on the matter, and urged right-wingers to “take a big step back.” The H-1B program permits US companies to hire qualified overseas workers.