Elon Musk has said he will rehire an employee of his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) who resigned after being linked to a racist social media account.
“He will be brought back,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Media reports tied Marko Elez, 25, who previously worked for Musk’s SpaceX company, to a now-deleted social media account that posted the incendiary comments.
Vice-President JD Vance had said earlier in the day that the young employee should be given a second chance.
The account connected to Mr Elez – first reported by the Wall Street Journal – posted a variety of inflammatory comments that were verified by the BBC as authentic.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” read one post from the pseudonymous account in July.
Another post, in September, said: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
“Normalize Indian hate,” another post that month said.
On Friday, President Donald Trump, when asked about Mr Elez’s resignation from Doge and Vance’s support for the employee, said he didn’t know about “that particular thing”, but agreed with the vice-president on the matter.
Writing on X, Vance said that while he disagreed “with some of Elez’s posts… I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life”.
Earlier in the day, Musk posted a poll on X inviting users to say whether the staff member should be brought back.
At least 78% voted in favour of his return out of hundreds of thousands who participated, according to results displayed underneath.
Responding to one user who said Musk should have a talk with Mr Elez “about the racist stuff. Not cool”, the billionaire replied: “True.”
Mr Elez’s resignation comes amid growing scrutiny of Doge, the government cost-cutting advisory group established by Trump.
On Thursday, a US judge threw up a roadblock to one of those initiatives, halting a plan to offer incentives to millions of federal workers to voluntarily resign this month.
Musk has championed an effort to dismantle USAID, the government agency responsible for international development.
All but a handful of essential staff – from a workforce of about 10,000 people – are set to be put on administrative leave at midnight on Friday, including thousands based overseas.
By BBC News
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