- DOGE staffer Marko Elez was listed as an employee on xAI’s internal database as of last week.
- Elez resigned from DOGE after being linked to controversial social media posts. Musk promised to rehire him.
- Elez worked for X and SpaceX. His employment at xAI was previously unreported.
Marko Elez, who resigned from and was then rehired at the Department of Government Efficiency, recently worked for Elon Musk’s xAI firm.
Elez previously worked as an engineer for two other Musk companies, SpaceX and X, according to an archived version of his LinkedIn profile. The archived profile did not mention working at xAI.
According to an xAI organization chart viewed by Business Insider last week, Elez was listed as an “active” employee. Elez began working at the AI startup on October 2, 2024, and his role was listed as “X Corp Partner.” (X Corp is the name of the company that owns the social media site X.) He was placed within the department “xAI Partner,” which has five members, according to the internal organization chart.
It’s unclear what the business unit does. xAI has built a Grok chatbot for X and shares a data center in Atlanta with the social media company, according to public records viewed by BI.
Elez sat two levels below cofounder Igor Babuschkin on the xAI org chart. Babuschkin reports directly to Musk, the CEO of the company.
The org chart does not say the exact employment status of Elez or any xAI employees, only that he was active in the company. It’s unclear how recently xAI has updated its org chart.
xAI declined to comment on Elez’s employment status at the company. Within four days after BI contacted the company for comment, Elez’s xAI email account stopped working.
When emails were sent to Elez’s xAI address on February 14, they were delivered. A follow-up email sent on Tuesday bounced back with the message “the email account that you tried to reach is inactive.”
The 25-year-old Elez made headlines earlier this month after The Wall Street Journal reported on Elez’s since-deleted social media account with inflammatory posts such as “I was racist before it was cool.”
Elez resigned from his government role after the Journal contacted government officials for comment. He was one of two Musk recruits who had worked within the US Treasury Department. DOGE’s access to the central Treasury payment has sparked a lawsuit from 19 Democratic state attorneys general.
The day after the Journal article was published and Elez resigned, Musk said on X that he planned to rehire Elez. Elez appears to have a working email address with the White House DOGE office; a message sent to that account on Tuesday afternoon was delivered but did not receive a response.
Musk has been known to move workers between his companies. When the billionaire took over Twitter in 2022 he brought in dozens of Tesla engineers to assist. xAI has also hired several former Tesla employees. Workers from several of Musk companies have joined the DOGE effort, including The Boring Company and SpaceX.
Brent Griffiths, Jack Newsham, and Eliza Relman contributed reporting.
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