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.
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 from his Trump administration post over the exposure of tweets advocating for racism and eugenics.
“Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” the Tesla CEO Musk wrote in 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 inflammatory posts.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted last summer, the Journal reported.
In June, the account posted: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Musk’s poll, which is set to close before noon ET on Friday, had more than 203,000 votes as of 10:15 a.m.
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 were 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 that highly sensitive system with other people.
Elez previously worked for X and another Musk company, SpaceX.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Bloomberg news service Thursday that he personally had vetted one of the two Treasury employees from Musk’s DOGE team. It was not clear if that person was Elez, who resigned after Bessent gave his interview.
“These are highly trained professionals,” Bessent told Bloomberg. “This is not some roving band running around doing things.”
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