Top staffer in Elon Musk’s DOGE resigns after vile racist posts uncovered

An Elon Musk appointed staffer, Marko Elez, who was given access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems, has quit after racist social media posts were uncovered.

Marko Elez previously worked at Musk‘s companies SpaceX and X – formerly known as Twitter – before being employed by the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinise federal spending.

In recent days, the 25-year-old DOGE employee was at the centre of a legal battle over being given access to taxpayer information and sensitive Treasury Department systems which process trillions of dollars worth of payments every year.

He is one of a group of young men that the media has dubbed the “DOGE kids”, a young cohort of engineers who have led attempts to gain access to key data from several federal agencies and administrations.

On Thursday (6 February), a judge ruled Elez, alongside a second Musk ally, could continue to access the information but would be limited to ‘read-only’ access and could not share the data anyone outside the agency.

Elon Musk's top DOGE staffer Marko Elez just quit because his racist twitter posts were exposed.@elonmusk @DanScavino pic.twitter.com/S4s0H4YdaP

— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) February 6, 2025

He resigned from his position the same day when an investigation by the The Wall Street Journal linked him to a social media account which – in the words of the WSJ report – “advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a ‘eugenic immigration policy’.”

A now-deleted account on Musk’s platform X, called @nullllptr, was linked to Elez with the WSJ stating a review of archived posts found its username was previously @marko_elez and the user behind the account said they worked for SpaceX and Starlink.

The account made posts which included such vile statements such as “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity”, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool”, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth” and “Normalize Indian hate.”

In a different post the account further expressed a dislike for Indian tech staffers, writing “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys”. LLMs refers to large language models such as ChatGPT.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt subsequently confirmed Elez had resigned from his role.

Marko Elez’s resignation comes in the wake of serious upheaval at the heart of the US government, instigated by Musk, including the removal of two top security officials at the United States Agency for International Development, John Voorhees and his deputy, after they refused access to restricted, highly classified spaces to Elon Musk’s DOGE representatives last weekend.

USAID, a humanitarian aid agency, has been under siege since Trump came to power, with the Washington Post reporting that it has been: “whipsawed by aid freezes, personnel purges and confusion.”

On Saturday (1 February), a group of about eight DOGE officials entered the USAID building and demanded access to every door and floor, despite only a few of them having security clearance, according to a Senate Democratic staff member who spoke to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.

It is believed they were trying to access a sensitive compartmentalised information facility, where officials and government contractors take extraordinary precautions to review highly classified information. Voorhees was put on leave after he and his deputy attempted to prevent the DOGE officials from gaining access.