In late May, Elon Musk officially exited the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) amid internal feuds over the One Big Beautiful Bill and, importantly, widespread calls from his companies’ investors to focus on his day job(s) as CEO. However, as Will Royce wrote for the Prospect at the time, Musk’s fingerprints and associates remain all over the pseudo-agency. Chief among them is his longtime friend and investor, Antonio Gracias.
Gracias has been at DOGE for some time, first as a purveyor of Social Security misinformation, and now as chief of its immigration task force in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Similar to Musk, Gracias currently faces questions surrounding his time commitments with DOGE and its effect on his several other private-sector jobs. You see, Gracias remains CEO of Valor Equity Partners, a private equity investment manager handling $17.5 billion in assets, including hundreds of millions of dollars of public employees’ state and local pension funds.
This past June, the AFL-CIO published an informative report on Gracias, highlighting his role at DOGE and proposing due diligence questions regarding its impact on his capacity to appropriately fulfill his fiduciary responsibilities to Valor.
Even excluding his time at DOGE, Gracias’s work portfolio paints a picture of a man stretched thin indeed. He serves as both CEO and chief investment officer at Valor and is a member of each of the firm’s investment committees. According to his Valor biography, Gracias is also director of several companies in Valor’s portfolio, including SpaceX, AI infrastructure company WEKA, and delivery drone manufacturer Zipline. He’s a trustee of the Aspen Institute, board member of World Business Chicago, and a member of the board of visitors for Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and the University of Chicago Law School.
With the AFL-CIO’s new report, Antonio Gracias’s time in the federal government could be on a similar trajectory. He has already been a public face of one of DOGE’s worst scandals [sic]. Onstage with Musk ahead of the Wisconsin state supreme court election, Gracias helped launder an unfounded conspiracy that millions of undocumented immigrants were collecting Social Security. He and Musk claimed credit for DOGE uncovering the supposed scandal, and he later told the All-In podcast that it was “a move to import voters.” The claims were thoroughly debunked and revealed as either outright dishonesty or a comically stupid misunderstanding of the system. The millions of public employees whose pension funds are managed by Gracias and Valor may not appreciate his attempts to undermine one of the three legs of the retirement stool.
It’s not just Gracias either—he’s joined at DOGE by Jon Koval, a vice president on Valor’s investment team, and Payton Rehling, a Valor senior associate and data engineer. It’s unclear how many hours per week each of them is working at DOGE, but NPR reporting showed that descriptions from partially redacted court filings in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration match the biographies of Gracias, Koval, and Rehling. The filings indicate that all three are serving one-year terms as “experts” and are employed at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland….
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