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 lawsuit against Elon Musk, who leads X and SpaceX. Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), had previously filed an April 14, 2025 whistleblower complaint raising concerns that DOGE employees at the agency were given broad access to sensitive data with little meaningful oversight. After that complaint became public, Berulis alleges that on April 19, 2025, Musk shared a link on X to a story accusing him of lying, and highlighted the claim that “filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime” to his audience of over 200 million followers.
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.
What Berulis Says DOGE Did
While Musk’s DOGE no longer officially exists, many still have questions and concerns about the opaque, expansive way it operated. DOGE staffers demanded and regularly received unfettered access to sensitive and protected government data, bristling at any attempts at supervision or moderation. This clashed with the NLRB’s usual “Zero Trust” security policy, which limited employee access to the specific arenas they worked in.
Dan Berulis was part of the IT team at the NLRB, which focuses on unfair labor practices and serves as a repository for union and corporate strategies, secrets, and protocols. While DOGE’s mission was allegedly to remove government waste, Berulis discovered that the staffers were using their extensive access within the agency’s internal systems in a way in which Berulis viewed as inconsistent with standard controls.
While Berulis and his co-workers were severely limited in tracking what the DOGE employees were up to, they discovered a security breach and login attempts from an IP address in Russia on a newly minted DOGE account using the correct username and password. Berulis also said he uncovered a program on a DOGE staffer's public GitHub account called "NxGenBdoorExtract," which appeared set up to remove files from the NLRB servers. Alarmed, Berulis and his colleagues prepared a report for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), only to have the effort blocked. A few days later, Berulis found an envelope taped to the door of his office that contained a threatening note and a picture of him walking his dog near his home.
Although unnerved, Berulis decided DOGE’s behavior couldn’t go ignored. Soon after, he filed a whistleblower report and took leave when it was released on April 14, 2025. Despite his access privileges being suspended, several attempts to access his account from his office computer were made, some of which were successful. Berulis was not present at the time.
The First Cut Is the Deepest
On April 19, 2025, Musk responded to news of Berulis’s whistleblowing with a post on his X account. It featured a picture of Berulis, along with his full legal name. In addition, it contained Musk’s “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime” declaration and a link to the “@amuse” X account, which made the assertion that Berulis had been “caught lying.” The post, which generated over 41 million views, garnered more than 14,000 comments, many calling for Berulis’s arrest, conviction, or imprisonment. Others threatened more violent solutions.
The suit claims that Berulis was unaware of Musk’s post when his brakes failed on April 20, forcing him to crash his vehicle. It also asserts that the subsequent discovery that the brake lines had been severed and the driver’s airbag module removed was not a coincidence, but the foreseeable result of Musk’s post and its impact on his audience.
Two of the charges levied against Musk are for defamation, accusing Musk of deliberately making a false statement about Berulis’s whistleblower report. There are indeed serious penalties for making a false whistleblower claim, including perjury. Berulis, who at the time was scheduled to offer sworn testimony before both the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the House Oversight Committee, maintains that he made a legitimate filing. With additional counts for intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, Berulis argues that Musk ignored his duty of reasonable care by not determining if there was any validity to the claim he linked to, which resulted in Berulis suffering health issues.
The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction ordering Musk to take down the post (yes, it’s still up) and to obtain financial relief of over $75,000. If punitive damages are awarded, Berulis requests that they be donated to charities that provide whistleblower assistance to those exposing hidden crimes.
