Tech billionaire Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to ask users if he should rehire one of his deputies who resigned on Thursday after racist social media posts of his resurfaced.
“Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” Musk wrote on X Friday morning, attached to a poll asking users to answer “Yes” or “No.”
As of 10:30 a.m. EST on Friday, the post had nearly 2.9 million views and more than 232,000 votes. More than 80 percent of users who answered selected “yes.”
Marko Elez, 25, resigned Thursday after briefly serving on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force. He previously worked for numerous companies run by Musk as well.
Elez came under fire earlier this week when The Wall Street Journal uncovered racist, now-deleted social media posts of his.
“Normalize Indian hate,” the account associated with Elez posted in September, regarding people of Indian ethnicity who work in the U.S. tech sector, the Journal reported.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on Elon Musk’s social media site X, according to The Journal.
It is not clear whether Musk will reinstate Elez based on the outcome of the X poll, a method often used by the billionaire to gauge public opinion.
Elez was one of two staffers who were given “read-only” access to highly sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department, the agency said. However, numerous reports suggested Elez had the ability to rewrite the payment system base code.
The Department of Justice agreed Wednesday to limit the number of employees affiliated with DGOE who have access to a sensitive federal payment system. Under the order, Elez and Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group, were permitted to have access to the Fiscal Service but will not be able to edit or make changes to the system, which manages 90 percent of federal payments.
The New York Times revealed emails between Krause and the newly appointed Treasury Department chief of staff showing how DOGE employees intended to target payments from them U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Musk and his DOGE allies pushed forward this week on an aggressive campaign to slash federal bureaucracy and spending. On his first day in office, Trump issued a federal government hiring freeze, and thousands of workers have been offered deferred resignation packages.
USAID has reportedly been slashed from more than 10,000 employees to fewer than 300 as part of this campaign.
Elez is among numerous DOGE deputies who were previously affiliated with Musks companies. Some DOGE staff members are fresh out of high school or college, with some as young as 19.
