Elon Musk and JD Vance Agree On Hiring Back DOGE Employee Who Wrote He Was “Racist Before It Was Cool”

Elon Musk said on Friday that he plans to rehire the Department of Government Efficiency employee who resigned after racist comments he made online were revealed by The Wall Street Journal. The staff member, 25-year-old Marko Elez, posted messages such as “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate,” according to the Journal.

Early Friday, Musk—the richest man in the world whose influence in Washington has grown with concerning speed following President Donald Trump’s election—asked his X followers if he should rehire Elez, referring to him as a DOGE “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now-deleted pseudonym.” More than two-thirds of respondents said yes to the poll, which garnered 385,247 votes.

“Here’s my view,” Vice President JD Vance began in a post quoting the poll, “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever,” Vance continued. “So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.” Trump said he was “with the vice president” when asked about Vance’s response during a news conference.

Musk, who has been labeled a “special government employee” by the White House, responded to the VP’s post, writing, “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine,” with a salute emoji.

Before joining DOGE, Elez worked for Musk at SpaceX, Starlink, and X. It’s unclear if and when Elez, who stepped down on Thursday, will be returning to the newly-formed DOGE. The software engineer was “one of only two people affiliated with DOGE that a federal court allowed to access the Treasury Department system that is responsible for disbursing more than $5 trillion in annual payments,” according to the Washington Post. On Thursday morning, per reporting from the Journal, a District Court judge ruled that Elez could continue to access the treasury’s payment systems, but restricted his ability to share the data. He resigned later that same day.

Representative Ro Khanna, from California, responded to Vance’s post on X, noting that both of them have children of Indian heritage (the second lady, Usha Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants).

“Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire?” Khanna posted, “Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”

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Hours later, Vance wrote back, “I don’t worry about my kids making mistakes, or developing views they later regret. I don’t even worry that much about trolls on the internet. You know what I do worry about, Ro? That they’ll grow up to be a US Congressman who engages in emotional blackmail over a kid’s social media posts.”

Vance added: “You disgust me.”

Elez isn’t the only young person hired by DOGE whose digital footprint has come under scrutiny.

Reporting from Forbes revealed that another employee, Gavin Kliger, 24, reposted white nationalist Nick Fuentes, shared content from self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate, and called Hillary Clinton a slur. After Jose Ibarra, the man convicted of murdering Laken Riley, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Kliger suggested that Trump and Musk use a military tribunal to execute him, writing, “Make it happen.” He’s also defended both Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer found guilty in the death of George Floyd, and Daniel Penny, who was recently acquitted on charges of killing Jordan Neely on a New York Subway in 2023.

In November, Musk announced that he was on the lookout for “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting” to join DOGE. Since officially starting in late January, DOGE has already prompted several lawsuits, commandeered the federal government’s HR department, tried to entice 2 million federal workers to accept a “deferred resignation” package, deputized colleagues across the country to snitch on any diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and aided in the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID—amongst other things.

David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School, told the Washington Post that “so many of these things” that Musk has done through DOGE are “wildly illegal,” adding, “I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”