DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts
Wall Street Journal
By Katherine Long
Updated Feb. 6, 2025 5:12 pm ET
A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July, according to the Journal’s review of archived posts.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.
After the Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his role.
In recent days, Elez had emerged at the center of a legal battle over access to sensitive taxpayer information and systems the Treasury Department uses to process trillions of dollars in payments annually.
Thursday morning, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Elez could continue to access the department’s payment systems, but limited his ability to share the data. Elez resigned later that same day.
Elez didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
Elez attended Rutgers University, where he majored in computer science. As a sophomore, he co-founded a company, Unimetrics.io, that aimed to connect high-schoolers with mentors who could help burnish their college applications.
Elez went on to work for Musk at SpaceX, including on its Starlink satellites, and X, where he focused on artificial intelligence, according to archives of his personal website.
DOGE has radically upended the federal government in the weeks since President Trump’s inauguration, including by largely dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Musk personally urged people to apply to DOGE on X in December, promising long hours and little pay in exchange for the chance to fundamentally remake the federal government. Some of those who answered the call appear to be young Musk loyalists, steeped in internet culture, who share his worldview.
In an interview Thursday with Bloomberg, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the work of DOGE employees appended to the Treasury Department, describing them as “highly trained professionals.”
“This is not some roving band running around doing things,” Bessent continued.
The account, @nullllptr—a misspelling of a keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived.
The user appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers. “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys,” the user posted in December, referring to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In June, the user weighed in on the conflict in the Middle East, offering some sympathy for Israel but also posting, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The deleted @nullllptr account previously went by the username @marko_elez, a review of archived posts shows. The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink.
Elez currently operates another X account, which also has the username @marko_elez; the two accounts often interacted with the same users and posted similar content, including posts complimentary of Musk and SpaceX, archives show.
By Katherine Long
Updated Feb. 6, 2025 5:12 pm ET
A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July, according to the Journal’s review of archived posts.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.
After the Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his role.
In recent days, Elez had emerged at the center of a legal battle over access to sensitive taxpayer information and systems the Treasury Department uses to process trillions of dollars in payments annually.
Thursday morning, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Elez could continue to access the department’s payment systems, but limited his ability to share the data. Elez resigned later that same day.
Elez didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
Elez attended Rutgers University, where he majored in computer science. As a sophomore, he co-founded a company, Unimetrics.io, that aimed to connect high-schoolers with mentors who could help burnish their college applications.
Elez went on to work for Musk at SpaceX, including on its Starlink satellites, and X, where he focused on artificial intelligence, according to archives of his personal website.
DOGE has radically upended the federal government in the weeks since President Trump’s inauguration, including by largely dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Musk personally urged people to apply to DOGE on X in December, promising long hours and little pay in exchange for the chance to fundamentally remake the federal government. Some of those who answered the call appear to be young Musk loyalists, steeped in internet culture, who share his worldview.
In an interview Thursday with Bloomberg, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the work of DOGE employees appended to the Treasury Department, describing them as “highly trained professionals.”
“This is not some roving band running around doing things,” Bessent continued.
The account, @nullllptr—a misspelling of a keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived.
The user appeared to have a special dislike for Indian software engineers. “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys,” the user posted in December, referring to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
In June, the user weighed in on the conflict in the Middle East, offering some sympathy for Israel but also posting, “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
The deleted @nullllptr account previously went by the username @marko_elez, a review of archived posts shows. The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink.
Elez currently operates another X account, which also has the username @marko_elez; the two accounts often interacted with the same users and posted similar content, including posts complimentary of Musk and SpaceX, archives show.
