'Could do anything': 25 year-old Musk employee has admin access to $6 trillion payment system

The U.S. Treasury Department's internal systems that handle roughly $6 trillion in annual payments to millions of Americans are now in the hands of a young software engineer who works for Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

That's according to a recent report by WIRED, which identified the Musk employee as 25 year-old Marko Elez. The outlet reported that Elez has administrator-level access to systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). WIRED's article disputes previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal that Musk's team was limited to read-only access, as Elez can now "log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions and delete or modify critical files."

"You could do anything with these privileges," one unnamed source told WIRED. The outlet noted that anyone with that level of access could "bypass the security measures of, potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to."

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Elez — who did not return AlterNet's requests for comment via phone and email — has deleted his public LinkedIn profile. But records reviewed by AlterNet show he graduated Montgomery High School in Skillman, New Jersey in 2018, and graduated from Rutgers University in 2021 before joining SpaceX as a software engineer. He then followed Musk to X (formerly Twitter), where he currently works as an engineer. Elez's public GitHub profile shows he's worked previously in machine learning and distributed systems.

The systems Elez now controls made billions of payments last year totaling roughly $5.4 trillion, according to the Washington Post. They oversee Social Security payments, Medicare benefits, federal income tax returns, small business loans, federal grants and government contracts, among others. CNN previously reported that Musk's representatives had been clamoring for access to those systems since December, and were they were particularly interested in learning how to stop certain payments.

Longtime Treasury Department official David Lebryk — who served under 11 Treasury secretaries appointed by presidents from both parties over several decades — refused to hand over access to those systems when he was serving as acting Treasury secretary. But after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was confirmed, Lebryk was placed on leave and subsequently announced his retirement.

Over the weekend, Musk defended his actions on X by asserting that his team simply wanted to stop payments to “known fraudulent or terrorist groups,” though he offered no evidence of that happening. Journalist Nathan Tankus wrote in his Notes on the Crises newsletter that the BFS already has a “payments integrity unit” that consistently works alongside federal agencies to ensure all payments are proper.

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Click here to read WIRED's report in full.