Billionaire Elon Musk’s descent into the far-right rabbit hole has been no secret, funneling tens of millions of dollars into overtly racist political advertising, using his massive platform at his social media site to unapologetically promote deadly conspiracy theories and, more recently, thrilling white nationalists by repeatedly raising his hand in a shocking salute. The shocking display at the Trump inaugural event – which coincided with the commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day – was “about as unsubtle as it gets,” New York Times contributor Wajahat Ali noted. Just this past weekend, Musk again invoked the white nationalist “great replacement theory.”
So it’s really no shock that a number of the unqualified tech bros who are a part of Musk’s “DOGE” outfit – the illegitimate gang of snitches that has carried out an “unconstitutional government takeover,” including gaining access to the Social Security numbers and other private information belonging to millions of Americans – have sent very racist tweets or have super offensive ties. Despite that, Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance have defended at least one of them.
25-year-old mini-Musk Marko Elez, who at one point had the power to edit the Treasury Department’s vast payment system, resigned after The Wall Street Journal linked him to a social media account that reportedly boasted about being “racist before it was cool” and that “you could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity.” In response to large Indian-American communities in California’s South Bay, The Wall Street Journal said he posted a call to “normalize Indian hate.” He resigned after the outlet reached out to the White House for comment, which should have been the end of his short and unofficial stint in government.
But in the hours after the report broke, the White House, led by Vice President JD Vance, shockingly called for his reinstatement.
“Here’s my view: 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 posted at the far-right site formerly known as Twitter. “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.” Well, some might say that declaring the normalization of hate against an entire ethnic group actually is being “a bad dude or a terrible member of the team.”
And, one can’t help but wonder what Usha Vance, JD’s spouse and the nation’s first Indian-American Second Lady, thinks of the fact that her husband is defending a 25-year-old “kid” who wants to “normalize Indian hate.” As Defector noted, Vance once upon a time decried Trump as “reprehensible.” But this pack of bullies and deplorables is his crowd now (at least for the time being. They did turn on the guy Vance replaced, after all). “To satisfy his base, Vance has to appear, if not outright enthusiastic about the notion of deporting people like his in-laws, at least not stridently opposed to it,” Defector continued.
“President Donald Trump, when asked about Vance’s response during a news conference, said, ‘I’m with the vice president,’” NBC News reported. The message was loud and clear: the promotion of racist violence is not only tolerated by the current federal government, it is shamelessly accepted, no matter how reprehensible.
But this might as well be a prerequisite to work for team “DOGE,” because just a couple days after The Wall Street Journal’s explosive report, the independent Musk Watch outlet reported that another mini-Musk who purportedly works for Marco Rubio’s State Department apparently “ran image-sharing site linked to URLs referencing pedophilia and the KKK”:
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched an image-sharing website in 2021 that featured custom “shitposting” web addresses that redirected to content hosted on his site. URLs that redirected to Coristine’s site referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Among the links were “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club,” according to web traffic tracked by BuiltWith.
The White House and Coristine did not respond to requests for comment.
A former intern at Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, Coristine was named senior adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology on Monday, the Washington Post reported. He is also listed as an “expert” at the Office of Personnel Management.
Musk Watch further reported that Coristine “interacted at least once with prominent eugenicist and white supremacist Joseph Bronski. Communication history saved on X shows that Coristine responded to a November 2023 post in which Bronski wrote, ‘White 12 year olds have higher IQs than black adults… Where should the IQ cut off for rights be? The current legal standard is inconsistent.’ It is unclear what Coristine wrote in response to the post, as his reply has been deleted.”
Coristine is also apparently known online by the nickname “Big Balls.” Yup, under Musk’s orders and against the protests of career officials, someone nicknamed “Big Balls” has gained “access to the most sensitive data in government,” as Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told Wired. When it comes to Elez, Musk publicly said he would bring him back onboard but it’s unclear if he has actually done so.
“Responding to one user who said Musk should have a talk with Mr Elez ‘about the racist stuff. Not cool’, the billionaire replied: ‘True,’” BBC reported.
Uh huh. “Elon Musk keeps boosting white nationalists on X,” read one recent Mother Jones headline. Among the accounts that Musk has interacted with include a user who called the Holocaust’s death toll “impressive.” Following Musk’s purchase of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, verified pro-Nazi accounts flourished on the site, NBC News reported in 2024. Extremists who were previously banned on the site, including accounts that the perpetually-online Musk has personally interacted with, have also boasted about being restored to the platform following his takeover. And prior to the 2024 election, Musk amplified the replacement theory in order to use immigrants to sow election mistrust and drive the effort to overturn the results if they didn’t go in Trump’s favor.
Now that musk is saying he’s doing the DOGE stuff “because the globalists have plotted a Great Replacement in which they use government handouts to buy votes from illegal immigrants and urban blacks” maybe we don’t have to act like this is about deficits or cost cutting anymore
— Jake Grumbach (@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T23:03:03.257Z
Musk continues to echo this deadly conspiracy theory, just reshifting it to defend his illegitimate “DOGE” outfit and agitate anxieties of scarcity by falsely claiming that undocumented immigrants are reaping all sorts of benefits. Unsurprisingly, what Musk won’t mention is the fact that, much like Trump, his business cred has been thanks in part to undocumented labor.
