Elon Musk has announced that he will reinstate an employee of his newly established Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who resigned after being linked to a racist social media account.
“He will be brought back,” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Media reports identified Marko Elez, 25, a former SpaceX employee, as being connected to a now-deleted social media account that had posted inflammatory comments.
Vice-President JD Vance had earlier voiced support for giving the employee a second chance. One post from July stated: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
In September, another post read: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” A separate post from the same month declared: “Normalize Indian hate.”
On Friday, President Donald Trump was asked about Mr. Elez’s resignation from Doge and Vance’s public support for him. Trump responded that he was not familiar with “that particular thing” but agreed with the vice president’s stance.
Elon Musk (Photo: AP)Vance, writing on X, acknowledged that he disagreed “with some of Elez’s posts” but argued, “I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”
Earlier in the day, Musk had posted a poll on X, allowing users to vote on whether Mr. Elez should be reinstated. According to the results displayed underneath the poll, at least 78% of hundreds of thousands of participants supported his return.
One X user urged Musk to talk with Mr. Elez “about the racist stuff. Not cool.” In response, Musk simply replied: “True.”
Mr. Elez’s resignation comes amid increasing scrutiny of Doge, the cost-cutting government advisory group created by Trump.
On Thursday, a U.S. judge blocked one of its initiatives, halting a plan that would offer incentives for millions of federal workers to voluntarily resign this month.
Musk has also been a leading advocate for dismantling USAID, the U.S. government agency responsible for international development.
As part of this effort, nearly the entire workforce of about 10,000 employees—excluding only a handful of essential staff—is set to be placed on administrative leave at midnight on Friday, including thousands stationed overseas.