A key staffer connected to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resigned on Thursday after now-deleted racist social media posts including some apparently directed at Indian software engineers, and Musk’s H1B fight resurfaced, according to media reports.
Marko Elez, 25, was identified earlier this week as the engineer who was granted access to the Treasury’s “top-secret” payment system, which controlled social security and tax distributions.
READ: DOGE leaders Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy target 94% of remote federal workers (December 9, 2024)
The Wall Street Journal reported on a number of 2024 posts from an account connected to Elez on Musk’s X platform and noted that White House officials confirmed his resignation after the paper pointed out Elez’s activity on the social media site.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” read a September X post from the now-deleted account. Another post urged, “Normalize Indian hate,” allegedly referring to Indian workers in Silicon Valley, WSJ reported.
The account in question, @nullllptr, made several disparaging remarks about Indians and immigration in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
In a post appearing to be directed at Indian software engineers and Musk’s H1B fight, the account wrote, “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys.”
A July post by @nullllptr boasted, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
When the Trump administration was asked about Elez’s connection with the account, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said he had resigned, WSJ reported.
In other posts, from December, the account pushed for repealing the Civil Rights Act and shared: “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.”
Commenting on the Israel-Gaza war in July, a post read, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
NPR said all of the posts have now been deleted, but it has independently confirmed them using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which scrapes and archives vast parts of the open web. Elez did not return NPR’s requests for comment.
READ: Will Vivek Ramaswamy withdraw from DOGE? (January 20, 2025)
And his colleagues reportedly left chaos and contempt in their wake as they systemically gained access to the federal government’s most sensitive databases and departments. Allegations include screaming fits and physical altercations with security as the young staffers were met with resistance by some senior government workers, according to Daily Beast.
Elez, who formerly worked at Musk companies X and SpaceX, was one of two temporary appointees at Treasury connected to DOGE who have been granted access to a highly sensitive Treasury system that processes trillions of dollars in payments every year, according to NPR.