A member of billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has resigned after reports exposed that he was behind a deleted social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.
Engineer Marko Elez, one of the infamous young members of DOGE, has worked for Musk’s companies in other staff roles before. According to reporting from Wired, Elez’s role at DOGE granted him direct access to the Treasury Department’s systems, including those with “top-secret” clearance distinctions and those responsible for “nearly all payments made by the U.S. government.”
On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported on several now-deleted posts from X account @nullllptr, which reportedly belonged to Elez. Those posts included calls to repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a demand for the U.S. to adopt a “eugenic immigration policy,” and a call to “normalize Indian hate” within the tech sector, among other bigoted musings.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” Elez said in a post from September.
“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” he said in a post from July.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez also wrote that month.
When asked about the texts, the White House said that Elez immediately offered his resignation from DOGE.
Musk’s DOGE project, a “department” with dubious legal status that was only formed through an executive order from President Donald Trump, has been ripping through several government departments and agencies, halting spending for key programs, pressuring government workers to take purported “buyout” plans to resign from their positions, and taking other actions without any kind of oversight or transparency.
Notably, Musk himself has consistently expressed extreme far right views. He was recently accused of publicly performing a Nazi salute, and endorsed Alternative for Germany (AfD) in that country’s upcoming elections, a neo-Nazi political party whose leaders have repeatedly peddled anti-immigrant and antisemitic rhetoric and downplayed or outright denied the Holocaust.
Musk vehemently opposes any government or private sector program that promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, and has espoused many transphobic views on social media. After Musk purchased Twitter, which he renamed X, the site saw a massive spike in neo-Nazi and white nationalist content, with the billionaire himself making racist posts on the platform.
Earlier this week, Democrats in Congress made several attempts to probe Musk’s brazen takeover of government agencies, demanding that he testify about his work before a congressional committee, for example.
“Who is this unelected billionaire that he can attempt to dismantle federal agencies, fire people, transfer them, offer them early retirement and have sweeping changes to federal agencies without having any congressional review?” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia) asked during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday. In that hearing, he called for Musk to be subpoenaed by the panel — an effort that ultimately failed due to every Republican on the committee voting against it.
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