A 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency engineer who sent shockwaves through Capitol Hill by his access to sensitive U.S. Treasury payment systems has stepped down from his role at DOGE over scrutiny about racist internet posts, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Marko Elez, who worked for Elon Musk-owned companies SpaceX, Starlink and X before signing on for a role at DOGE, resigned Thursday over questions about his ties to a social media account that promoted "racism and eugenics," the Journal reported.
His resignation came after the publication questioned the White House about his connections to the now-deleted social media account, the report added.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September, a Wall Street Journal review of archived posts found. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post "noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley," the Journal said.
Elez, who attended Rutgers University and focused on artificial intelligence while working at Musk’s companies, had full control over the computer code that directs Security payments, tax returns and other payments owed to Americans – which raised concerns for lawmakers on Capitol Hill and became the center of a lawsuit filed by federal workers.
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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keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived,” according to the Journal report.
Another post from the user in December appeared to show a particular dislike for Indian software engineers: “99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys”
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” @nullllptr posted in July, the Journal reported.
“The deleted @nullllptr account previously went by the username @marko_elez, a review of archived posts shows,” the report said. “The user behind the @nullllptr also described themselves as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink, where Elez has worked, according to archives of Elez’s personal website.”
Elez didn’t respond to the Journal's requests for comment.