Marko Elez, the 25-year-old staffer Department of Government Efficiency staffer linked to a social media profile with racist posts, “will be brought back,” shortly after he resigned, Elon Musk announced on X.
is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
Elez resigned from his role where he reportedly had the ability to rewrite code in sensitive payments systems at the US Treasury, once The Wall Street Journal inquired about his connection to a deleted account. That account, which the Journal found previously had the username “@marko_elez,” called for reinstating a “eugenic immigration policy,” repealing the Civil Rights Act, and said that “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs.”
Musk posted a poll on X Friday asking if the DOGE staffer who “made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym” should be brought back. As of that afternoon, 78 percent of nearly 400,000 respondents voted “yes.”
Vice President JD Vance weighed in to say that while he “obviously disagree[s] with some of Elez’s posts,” he doesn’t believe that “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” Musk apparently agrees — he responded to Vance in a post Friday afternoon, saying, “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Elez isn’t the only DOGE staffer drawing scrutiny. 19-year-old Edward Coristine was fired from an internship at a cybersecurity company in 2022 where he was accused of leaking internal information to rivals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also found a Discord account it linked to Coristine where he claimed to still have access to the company’s computers, but claimed he “never exploited it because it’s just not me.”
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