‘Normalise Indian hate’: DOGE staffer resigns over racial posts

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July, according to the WSJ’s review of archived posts.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September, according to the report. “Normalise Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

Later, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Elez had resigned from his role.

In recent days, Elez had also emerged at the centre of a legal battle over access to sensitive taxpayer information and systems the Treasury Department uses to process trillions of dollars in payments annually.

On the day Elez quit, a US District Court judge also ruled that he could continue to access the department’s payment systems, but limited his ability to share the data.

Elez majored in computer science from Rutgers University. He co-founded Unimetrics.io, which aimed to connect high-schoolers with mentors who could help burnish their college applications.

Elez worked for Musk at SpaceX, including on its Starlink satellites, and X, where he focused on artificial intelligence, according to archives of his personal website quoted by WSJ.

Musk, who also owns Tesla, besides X and SpaceX, had recently weighed in to favouring the hiring of H-1B visa-holders and said he “will go to war” on the issue and asked right-wingers to “take a big step back”. The H-1B programme allows businesses in the US to employ skilled foreign nationals.