Elon Musk said Friday that he will reinstate a member of his self-styled “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit who resigned after being linked to an openly racist social media account.
In a post on X, the social media platform he owns, Musk said that Marko Elez, 25, who was at the centre of a court battle over access to the US government’s payment system and has also worked for Musk’s SpaceX company, “will be brought back”.
“To err is human, to forgive divine,” Musk wrote.
Elez was established on Thursday to be the owner of a now-deleted account that boasted of racist beliefs and advocated eugenics, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” read a post on the X account, @nullllptr, last July.
In September, the same account posted: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
A separate post, responding to another user’s comment on the prevalence of people of Indian origin in Silicon Valley, read: “Normalize Indian hate.”
Musk’s decision to reinstate Elez comes after Musk asked users on X whether he should reinstate him, prompting JD Vance, the vice-president, to offer his support in a social media post that referred to Elez as “a kid” whose life was being “destroyed” by journalism.
“Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” wrote Vance, whose wife, Usha, is of Indian origin. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.
“If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that”.
Asked about the firing during a press conference Friday, Trump said he didn’t know about the particulars “but if the vice-president said that … I’m with the vice-president”.
Musk asked X users in a poll whether he should bring back Elez. The final results showed 78% in favour against 22% opposed, out of 385,247 votes.
The decision comes despite Elez’s history of racist posts. In December, referring to H-1B visas awarded to highly qualified, foreign-born tech workers, Elez wrote: “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs [a type of artificial intelligence], they’re going back don’t worry guys.”
Musk has been a vocal proponent of H-1B visas, which his Tesla car company utilises to employ engineers and other skilled workers from abroad. His support for the visas has brought him into conflict with leading champions of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) supporters, including Steve Bannon.
The Journal reported that the @nullllptr account had previously gone under the username @marko_elez. The user described themselves as an employee of SpaceX and Starlink, the company’s satellite programme.
An earlier post on the Middle East expressed support for Israel but added: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Elez had resigned from his role after the newspaper inquired about the account.
His resignation came hours after a court ruled that he and another Doge worker could continue to access the treasury department’s payment system, containing the personal and financial data of millions of US citizens, but barred them from sharing or altering the information.
Doge has thrown the federal government into disarray since Trump’s return to the White House – including by shuttering USAid, the country’s international assistance agency – as part of Musk’s quest to root out what he considers waste and corruption from public spending programmes.
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