Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, speaks with CNBC on May 16th, 2023.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
A staff member on the Department of Government Efficiency team led by tech billionaire Elon Musk resigned Thursday after the Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to a social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.
The DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, earlier Thursday had been approved by a federal judge along with another DOGE staff member to have access to the payment system at the U.S. Treasury, but restricted his ability to share data from the system.
The Journal said it had established links between the 25-year-old Elez and a social media account on Musk’s platform X that was deleted in December.
“The deleted @nullllptr account previously went by the username @marko_elez, a review of archived posts shows,” the Journal reported. “The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink, where Elez has worked, according to archives of Elez’s personal website.”
Musk is playing a major role in efforts by President Donald Trump to slash federal government spending and employee headcount. Elez had been designated a special government employee.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” @nullllptr tweeted on X in September, the Journal reported.
“Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley,” according to the Journal.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July, according to the newspaper.
In June, the account tweeted, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that Elez resigned after the Journal inquired about the account.
A White House official confirmed Elez’s resignation to CNBC.
In an interview with the Bloomberg news service published Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had personally vetted one of the two Treasury employees from Musk’s DOGE team.
“These are highly trained professionals,” Bessent told Bloomberg. “This is not some roving band running around doing things.”
“This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings,” the Treasury chief said.
