2 hours ago
2 ARTICLE AD
Elon Musk’s DOGE, the fake government agency currently doing real damage to the safety and security of the United States, just lost one of its most crucial members. And it will come as no surprise that this distinguished member of Musk’s team left because he was allegedly writing racist garbage on the internet.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who previously worked at X and SpaceX, resigned from DOGE on Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the newspaper contacted Donald Trump’s administration to ask about old deleted posts that advocated for racism and eugenics. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the Journal Elez had resigned.
Elez allegedly operated the account @nullllptr, which was deleted in December. But the account was filled with tweets like, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool” and, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” according to the Journal. That last tweet was reportedly sent in September, just a couple of months before the 2024 election. Gizmodo was able to view the account on the Wayback Machine on Thursday afternoon, but within an hour, it was gone.
The account often wrote about politics and international affairs, tweeting in June, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” according to the Journal. Trump himself announced Tuesday he wants the U.S. to take control of the Gaza strip and forcibly displace the roughly 2 million people who live there, handing control to Israel at some point in the future.
The account also seemed fixated on people from India, writing “Normalize Indian hate” and supporting a so-called “eugenic immigration policy,” tweets that are shocking to normal people but have become fairly typical on extremist social media platforms like X.
Elez, who graduated from Rutgers, was reportedly central to Musk and Trump’s joint effort to dismantle the federal government and had gained access to the U.S. Treasury’s payments system. Early reports about Elez from mainstream outlets like the New York Times tried to claim Elez only had “read-only” access to data at Treasury, but Wired spoke with two sources who said DOGE had full administrative access.
Union members and retirees from the federal government filed a lawsuit over DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payment systems. And news outlets like NBC News reported that the Trump administration had “agreed to restrict DOGE access.” But there were two exceptions: Tom Krause and Marko Elez were allowed to have access “as needed” provided it was in “read-only.”
Sadly, there are still plenty of other DOGE workers taking sledgehammers to the federal government right now, even with Elez gone. At the Office of Personnel Management, DOGE goons have been given access to sensitive systems, and one young henchman was even “screaming” at senior developers there, according to the Washington Post, calling the staff “idiots.”
It’s actually pretty surprising that anyone could be considered too racist for the Trump administration, especially considering Musk’s recent Nazi-style salutes. But maybe the little guy just thought it was too much stress being under the national spotlight. If you’re going to tinker with the nation’s critical infrastructure and work for literal fascists, you’re bound to feel a little heat.
Elez didn’t immediately respond to a tweet sent Thursday seeking comment. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
