DOGE chief Musk asks X users if staffer who quit over racist tweets should be rehired
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk takes his seat at the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. President in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk on Friday launched a poll on his social media platform X asking users if a staffer at his DOGE team should be rehired after resigning over the exposure of tweets advocating for racism and eugenics.
“Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” Musk wrote on a tweet, which carried the options “yes” and “no” for users to click on.
The staffer, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about the 25-year-old’s connection to an X account that had made a number of inflammatory posts.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted last summer, the Journal reported.
Elez was one of a group of young adults on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, which has been tasked by President Donald Trump to cut federal spending and reduce the U.S. government workforce.
On Thursday, before he quit, Elez and another DOGE staffer had been approved by a federal judge to have access to the payment system of the U.S. Treasury. The judge restricted their ability to share data from the system with other people.
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