Katherine Long
reported in the Wall Street Journal today that a member of Elon Musk’s elite tech squad resigned after some of his deleted tweets surfaced. The tweets portrayed their author as an enthusiast 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.
Elez is a graduate of Rutgers, where he majored in computer science. After college, he worked for Musk at Space X, Starlink, and X.
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.
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keyword in the C++ programming language—was deleted in December, but hundreds of brash, sometimes-sophomoric posts have been archived.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.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” @nullllptr posted in July.
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.”
