Marko Elez is a trendsetter. "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool," he posted on X in 2024. At 25, the former SpaceX and X engineer, with zero government experience, became one of Elon Musk's "baby-faced assassins.” His assignment at the Treasury Department: payment systems that move $5 trillion a year, more than a fifth of the US economy. Treasury swore his access was "read-only." Turns out that he'd been "mistakenly" handed the power to edit them. Oops.
Elez resigned from Treasury after the Wall Street Journal dug up some of his other greatest hits on social media: “Normalize Indian hate.” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” And a humble wish for “a eugenic immigration policy.”
The (selectively) empathetic JD Vance said “stupid social media activity” shouldn’t “ruin a kid’s life,” and the Big Boss said he was “with the vice president.” So within two weeks, the kid was back in the federal government. Never mind that a Treasury review would soon find that Elez had emailed an unencrypted spreadsheet of names and payment data to his DOGE pals, without approval and against Treasury rules. But hey, he’s just a kid.
Elez moved on to Labor and was quickly farmed out to Health and Human Services, DOGE’s White House office and several other agencies, racking up access to Medicare payment systems and child support records along the way. His most fitting stop was the Social Security Administration (SSA), where his views on immigration could finally be put to work.
In March 2025, a DOGE staffer at SSA—who, NPR reported, "appears to be" Elez—requested access to SAVE, the federal database that verifies immigration status, copying DOGE colleague Antonio Gracias. Soon after, Gracias was publicly claiming Social Security data had caught noncitizens voting, "well over a thousand" in one state. Yeah? Like the 16,000 purportedly suspicious voters the administration flagged in Nevada that quickly vanished into zero ineligible voters under state inspection?
But no matter if citizens are denied a vote. They aren’t Elez’s ethnicity.
