‘To err is human’: Elon Musk vows to rehire DOGE staffer who resigned over racist posts
Elon Musk has vowed to “bring back” a high-ranking DOGE employee, less than a day after the staffer resigned over his history of racist social media posts.
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Elon Musk has vowed to “bring back” a high-ranking member of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), less than a day after the staffer resigned due to his links to an openly-racist social media account.
Marko Elez, one of the “baby-faced” underlings deployed by Mr Musk in his controversial mission to dismantle US government agencies and scrutinise federal spending, was established to be the owner of the now-deleted X profile, @nulllptr, by The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” one post from the account read last July.
That same month, in a post aimed at Indian immigrants who work in Silicon Valley, in California, Mr Elez called to “normalise Indian hate”.
The 25-year-old, who formerly worked at Mr Musk’s SpaceX company, stepped down from DOGE’s tiny task-force, only to be reinstated by his former boss – a decision backed by Vice President JD Vance – not even 24 hours later.
Acknowledging Mr Elez’s departure, Mr Musk polled users on X as to whether he should “bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym”.
Out of 385,247 votes, the final results showed 78 per cent in favour, against 22 per cent opposed (keep in mind, X is the social media platform Mr Musk owns).
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Mr Vance then weighed in on the matter, retweeting Mr Musk’s nugget of data journalism and urging the world’s richest person to “bring him back” and declaring The WSJ the true villain for exposing Mr Elez in the first place.
While the Vice President said he “obviously” did not agree “with some of Elez’s posts … I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life”.
“We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” Mr Vance continued.
“So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
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It was a stance swiftly endorsed by the President himself: at a press conference, Donald Trump said that he didn’t know the former staffer, but supported Mr Vance’s Judgement.
“I don’t know about the particular thing, but if the vice president said that – did you say that? – I’m with the vice president,” Mr Trump said.
Retweeting Mr Vance’s post, Mr Musk wrote, alongside a ‘salute’ emoji: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
According to The WSJ, Mr Elez’s account was deleted in December – but hundreds of posts had been archived, many under the account’s previous handle @marko_elez.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” one read.
In yet another, Mr Elez wrote: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The account also called for America’s Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial segregation and other forms of racial discrimination and was passed in 1964, to be repealed.
Mr Elez also said he supported a “eugenic immigration policy” (the belief that certain races and ethnicities are morally and genetically superior to others).
Last weekend, Wired publicly named six young men who will play a critical role at DOGE, raising concerns about their young ages, lack of government experience and access to mountains of sensitive information as they take control of chokepoints including the Treasury Department’s payments system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA).
“Not many Spartans are needed to win battles,” Mr Musk wrote on X of his team.
Hours before his resignation, a federal judge ruled that Mr Elez and another DOGE worker could continue to access the Treasury Department’s system, which contains the personal and financial data of millions of US citizens.
The order ruled the duo could not share or alter the information.
Originally published as ‘To err is human’: Elon Musk vows to rehire DOGE staffer who resigned over racist posts
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