Posted on February 6, 2025

DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts

Katherine Long, Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2025

A staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whose access to U.S. Treasury payment systems was approved by a federal judge on Thursday has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.

The 25-year-old employee, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

The deleted profile associated with Elez, who was embedded in the Treasury Department to carry out efficiency measures, advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September, according to a Wall Street Journal review of archived posts. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

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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, Starlink, and X, where he focused on artificial intelligence, according to archives of his personal website.

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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keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived.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.

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