Elon Musk
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Update: Elon Musk says a DOGE staffer who made racist comments on X (Twitter) will be rehired after an online poll.

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who is part of Musk’s hacker team, resigned after The Wall Street Journal uncovered his racist tweets.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” read one of the tweets on Elez’s old account. The tweet was posted in July, and is now scrubbed along with his account.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” Elez wrote in another tweet in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” he wrote the same month.

On Friday, Musk posted a poll on X asking whether he should bring back Elez.

“Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” Musk asked.

Out of nearly 400,000 X users who took the poll, 78 percent said “yes” to 22 percent who said “no.”

Pool / MEGA/WENN

Vice President JD Vance was among those who said the racist engineer should be rehired.

“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on Friday. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”

In a tweet on Friday, Musk suggested that The Wall Street Journal reporter who uncovered the engineer’s racist tweets should be fired.

“She should be fired immediately,” Musk tweeted.

Elon Musk tweet

Elez’s supporters claim he was “a teenager” when he wrote the offensive tweets last year.

After the WSJ uncovered the account, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his job.

However, social media users say every racist deserves a second chance. They asked Musk to rehire Elez because he’s so young and all.

Elez is part of a team of young hackers who uncovered widespread abuse of taxpayer funds during an audit at the USAID humanitarian agency in Washington, DC.

The abuse includes $8 million in payments to Politico.com, $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 to a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.

Musk, who leads the team at DOGE, fired thousands of USAID workers and locked the doors of the building.

Viral video shows Democrat Ilhan Omar and other lawmakers desperately trying to enter the building after holding a Musk protest rally near the White House on Tuesday.