A member of Elon Musk’s self-styled “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit who was at the centre of a court battle over access to the US government’s payment system has resigned after being linked to an openly racist social media account.
Marko Elez, 25, who has worked for Musk’s SpaceX company, was established to be the owner of a now-deleted account that boasted of racist beliefs and advocated eugenics, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” read a post on the X account, @nullllptr, last July.
In September, the same account posted: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
A separate post, responding to another user’s comment on the prevalence of people of Indian origin in Silicon Valley, read: “Normalize Indian hate.”
In December, referring to H-1B visas awarded to highly qualified, foreign-born tech workers, he wrote: “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs [a type of artificial intelligence], they’re going back don’t worry guys.”
Musk has been a vocal proponent of H-1B visas, which his Tesla car company utilises to employ engineers and other skilled workers from abroad. His support for the visas has brought him into conflict with leading champions of Donald Trump’s make America great again (Maga) supporters, including Steve Bannon.
The Journal reported that the @nullllptr account had previously gone under the username @marko_elez. The user described themselves as an employee of SpaceX and Starlink, the company’s satellite programme.
An earlier post on the Middle East expressed support for Israel but added: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Elez had resigned from his role after the paper inquired about the account.
His resignation came hours after a court ruled that he and another Doge worker could continue to access the treasury department’s payment system, containing the personal and financial data of millions of US citizens, but barred them from sharing or altering the information.
Doge has thrown the federal government into disarray since Trump’s return to the White House – including shuttering USAid, the country’s international assistance agency – as part of Musk’s quest to root out what he considers waste and corruption from public spending programmes.
