Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer, is the first of Elon Musk’s DOGE crew to lose their job.
Elez resigned from his post at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal uncovered that Elez had published racist statements on an anonymous account that once bore his name.
However, on Friday, Musk confirmed he could bring Elez back to DOGE.
“He will be brought back,” Musk posted to his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, while quoting Vice President JD Vance’s post supporting Elez’s rehiring. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Tweet may have been deleted
On Friday morning, Elon Musk posted a poll on X asking his followers if he should reinstate the engineer who posted racist remarks.
“Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” posted Musk alongside a poll on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
The poll received more than 385,000 votes, which were overwhelmingly in favor of Musk rehiring Elez.
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Tweet may have been deleted
When working for DOGE, Elez was assigned to the Treasury Department. As Wired reported, Elez was given direct access to the federal government’s payment system, which includes U.S. citizens’ tax returns and Social Security payment information.
“Normalize Indian hate,” posted Elez under the username @nullllptr on X in July. The account formerly was tied to Elez directly by name before he changed it to an anonymous handle.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez also posted. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
Elez also reportedly advocated for “eugenic immigration policy” and rolling back the Civil Rights Act.
The 25-year-old Elez resigned from DOGE after the Wall Street Journal reached out to the White House.
Along with his poll to bring Elez back, Musk also called for the WSJ journalist, Katherine Long, to be fired for her reporting.
Trump’s Vice President, JD Vance, shared his own thoughts referring to Elez as a “kid” and backing bringing him back to DOGE.
Shortly after Musk’s and Vance’s remarks, two new reports dropped detailing concerning history about two other DOGE employees. Reuters published a report about DOGE employee Gavin Kliger and his history of amplifying white supremacists like Nick Fuentes. In another report, Bloomberg uncovered that 19-year-old DOGE employee Edward Coristine was previously fired from his internship with hosting and data security firm Path Network for leaking company information to a competitor.
These three DOGE employees, along with the rest of Musk’s DOGE team, are currently rifling through the federal government’s networks, accessing the private data of American citizens.
And when Elez returns to his DOGE post at the U.S. Treasury, it appears that he’ll have access to rewrite the code controlling trillions in spending, despite Trump officials falsely claiming he did not have those permissions.
