Washington, United States:
Elon Musk has reinstated Marko Elez, a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer, who resigned after his racist and eugenicist social media posts came to light. Musk made the decision after conducting a public poll on X, where an overwhelming majority voted in favour of Elez’s return.
The 25-year-old operated a now-deleted account, frequently posting racist and inflammatory content. In archived posts, he wrote, “Normalise Indian hare,” “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” and claimed that “99 per cent of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back, don’t worry guys.”
He also called for repealing the Civil Rights Act and expressed disdain for interracial marriage, writing, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
Elez also made controversial statements about the Middle East conflict, suggesting he would not care if “Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Who is Marko Elez?
- Marko Elez is a 25-year-old engineer who previously worked for Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter).
- He graduated from Rutgers University in 2021 where he majored in Computer Science. He has experience in vehicle telemetry, starship software, satellite software, search AI, and machine learning. His work history suggests he specialises in distributed systems, recommendation engines, and AI.
- As a sophomore, he co-founded Unimetrics.io, a company aimed at helping high school students with their college applications, as per the Wall Street Journal.
- He resigned from Musk’s DOGE after his racist posts resurfaced. At DOGE, he had direct access to the US Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) systems, which control federal payments, including Social Security and tax returns. His admin privileges reportedly allowed him to modify critical code in the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System, raising security concerns. A Wired report said his access was beyond the “read-only” level and that he has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems.
- A deleted social media account, @nullllptr, which previously used the username @marko_elez, posted racist content. The account also made derogatory remarks about Indian software engineers and posted extremist views on geopolitical conflicts. Elez currently operates another X account under the username @marko_elez, which has interacted with the same users and posted similar content as the deleted @nullllptr account.
