According to a recently filed lawsuit, one of Elon Musk’s social media posts nearly had fatal consequences for a DOGE whistleblower.
On April 17, 2026, Daniel Berulis filed a defamation suit against Musk, who leads X and SpaceX. The complaint claims that after Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), filed a whistleblower complaint on April 14, 2025, out of concern about the activities of DOGE employees at the agency, who were given broad access to sensitive data that, according to Berulis, faced little meaningful oversight. On April 19, 2025, after the report became public knowledge, Musk posted a link to a questionable story calling Berulis a liar to his X account, which the complaint estimates exceeds 200 million followers, along with the statement “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.”
Berulis’s pro se suit accuses Musk of inflaming his followers with a deliberately false post about his whistleblower disclosure, calling it the impetus behind someone cutting the brake lines and tampering with an airbag sensor on his car, which he crashed the next day. The suit seeks to hold Musk liable on the theory that, given the size of his audience and influence, he owed a duty of reasonable care before amplifying accusations that Berulis had lied.
While Musk’s DOGE no longer officially exists, many still have questions and concerns about the opaque, expansive way it operated. DOGE...
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