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 whether a staffer on his DOGE team should be rehired after resigning from the 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 ended around 11:15 a.m., drew more than 385,000 votes.
Of those votes, 78% said that Elez should be brought back, while 22% voted no on that question.
Elez was one of a group of young adults on Musk’s advisory team, called the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been tasked by President Donald Trump with cutting federal spending and reducing the U.S. government workforce.
On Thursday, before he quit, Elez and another DOGE staffer who were designated as special government employees 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.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in an interview Friday with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, spoke about DOGE employees being deployed to his department.
“The government is old and maybe a little bit stodgy,” Wright said. “We’ve got some young kids, think young gun management consultants, coming in to take a critical look at how things are run.”
“I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” Wright said. “They don’t have security clearances.”
CNN previously reported that a DOGE staffer was given access to the Energy Department’s IT system.
— CNBC’s Spencer Kimball contributed to this article.
