What We Know So Far About the Young Techies Working for DOGE
Just weeks after President Donald Trump took office, megadonor turned special government employee Elon Musk has penetrated deep into the heart of the federal administrative apparatus. His so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) now enjoys access to communication channels and sensitive information at agencies including the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the last of which Musk has vowed to eliminate entirely.
The spending freezes and staff purges at these agencies are being carried out by Musk loyalists, most of whom appear to be young male software engineers lacking in government experience, ages 19 to mid-20s. Both Musk and interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, a MAGA true believer, have threatened reprisals against anyone who names these DOGE foot soldiers, after Wired identified six of them on Sunday: Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. Other Musk allies and aides now working on his behalf in D.C. include Anthony Armstrong, Riccardo Biasini, Brian Bjelde, Steve Davis, Stephen Ehikian, Marko Elez, Nicole Hollander, Amanda Scales, Thomas Shedd, and Christopher Stanley. Once it became clear that he could not hope to conceal employees’ names, Musk on Monday posted to X, “Time to confess: Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true.”
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Here’s what we know so far about this crew.
Akash Bobba
Bobba, 21, attends the University of California, Berkeley, in the school’s Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology program. According to one of his classmates there, he is a gifted coder. He’s held internships at Meta as well as right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel‘s data analytics firm Palantir, working on AI systems. DOGE has placed him at OPM, the human resources agency for the federal government. He also has an active email address at the General Services Administration (GSA) and A-suite clearance, meaning he can be anywhere on the grounds and can access all IT systems. After his name became public, he set his X account to private and deleted his LinkedIn profile.
Edward Coristine
Coristine, 19, is a dropout of Northeastern University and, according to a friend, idolizes Musk. His now-deleted LinkedIn profile listed the username “bigballs” and included his experience as a camp counselor in Connecticut. On Coristine’s Github profile, his bio states, “It’s cheesy, but I’m passionate about improving humanity!” His now-private X account, meanwhile, bears a quote from Canadian self-help author Jordan Peterson (and the handle has been modified from the original name, @Edwardbigballer). Coristine has worked for his father’s snack company, LesserEvil, which sells “healthy” snacks and organic popcorn, and at Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip implant company. He has also founded several of his own nebulous corporations, including one called Tesla.Sexy LLC, which owns web domains registered in Russia. Security experts told Wired that because of foreign connections like these, his work at Path Network (which has hired hackers convicted of crimes), and evidence suggesting he may have once tried to pay for a cyberattack with Bitcoin, Coristine would be unlikely to clear a traditional background check for access to classified government data. (It’s not known whether anyone with DOGE received such vetting.)
He was also fired from Path in 2022 for “leaking of proprietary company information,” according to a spokesperson for the cybersecurity firm, and claimed to have continued access to the company’s computers after his dismissal. A review of his Telegram activity showed he belonged to groups associated with web forums known to organize harassment campaigns. Nonetheless, Coristine was one of two extremely young and apparently noncredentialed individuals that employees of Technology Transformation Services (TTS), within the GSA, were surprised to meet with in sit-downs where they had to defend their work. Coristine reportedly works for OPM and has a GSA email, as well as A-suite clearance.
Marko Elez
Elez, 25, is a graduate of Rutgers University who interned as an engineer at Amazon, then went on to work for SpaceX and then X. Unlike some of his colleagues, he maintains a public X account. Thanks to the approval of a federal judge, he briefly had access to the code for the Treasury Department systems that are used to manage federal payments including Social Security and tax refunds, and the administrator privileges necessary to amend this critical and otherwise highly secure digital infrastructure — much to the horror of veterans in government IT.
But Elez resigned from DOGE today after The Wall Street Journal linked him to a deleted X account that argued for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act and a “eugenic immigration policy” ahead of the 2024 election. The deleted profile also featured hate speech against Indian people, endorsed the complete destruction of both Gaza and Israel, and included a post that read, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed today that Elez no longer has a role in Musk’s government-slashing team.
On Friday, however, Musk pinned a poll to the top of his X profile, asking: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?”
A few hours later, Vice President J.D. Vance advocated for Elez to be brought back into the fold. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” he wrote. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
Luke Farritor
Farritor, 23, attended but did not graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He previously made headlines as one of the winners of the Vesuvius Challenge, a contest created by Silicon Valley backers that gave participants a year to decode one of the damaged papyrus scrolls preserved from a private library in a Roman town destroyed the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. Farritor, an intern at Musk’s company SpaceX at the time, used an AI program to decipher part of an ancient Greek text. He then dropped out of college and went to work for one of the contest organizers, tech investor and entrepreneur Nat Friedman. Last year, Farritor received a Thiel Fellowship, which is granted through Thiel’s foundation to students age 22 or younger who quit school to pursue opportunities like startups or scientific research. His LinkedIn page has disappeared, and his X account is private. He has a working email address with the GSA, where he has A-suite clearance. He has also been given access to USAID systems and is an “executive engineer” at the office of the secretary of health and human services.
Gautier Cole Killian
Killian, 24, who goes by his middle name, graduated from high school in 2019 and attended McGill University until at least 2021, and is working for DOGE as a volunteer. He previously worked for Jump Trading, a financial services company focused on algorithmic trading and cryptocurrency. An archived version of his deleted personal website notes his interest in topics such as “effective altruism” and books including Gaming the Future. Killian’s father is a doctor who has contributed cancer research for the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the largest biomedical research institution on the planet, and it’s now been thrown into turmoil by the Trump administration’s freezes on grants and travel spending. Killian appears on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website as a “Federal Detailee,” suggesting he has been assigned to make cuts there. His apparent X account is public though inactive since its creation last month, and he follows just one user: Elon Musk.
Gavin Kliger
Kliger, 25, has a LinkedIn résumé that identifies him as a “special advisor” at OPM. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020, worked at Twitter prior to Musk buying and rebranding the platform, and as a software engineer at Databricks, a data analytics and AI company. Kliger was the individual who sent an email late Sunday night informing USAID staffers, to their confusion and alarm, that the office would be closed to them on Monday. He maintains a Substack account where he has written in praise of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose confirmation process was dominated by allegations of alcohol abuse and sexual assault, and former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew as Trump’s pick for attorney general under a cloud of scandal and, according to a House ethics probe, once paid a 17-year-old for sex. Paying subscribers can also access a piece by Kliger titled “Why DOGE: Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America” — but behind the paywall, the post itself is blank.
On his X account, recently made private, Kliger can be seen wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and reposting content from Musk, far-right conspiracy theory and misinformation accounts, and the hate-speech account Libs of TikTok. Although Kliger removed his repost of white nationalist Nick Fuentes in December, the engagement was preserved on the Internet Archive. He has used the account to share content from misogynist manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, call Hillary Clinton a slur, and demand military tribunals and executions of undocumented migrants who commit crimes.
Ethan Shaotran
Shaotran, 22, is a Harvard University senior. Last fall, he wrote an essay for Business Insider, in which he discussed his startup Energize AI, which developed Spark, an AI scheduling assistant. The product received a $100,000 grant from OpenAI in 2023, but the Energize AI website currently returns an error message. Shaotran also worked on autonomous vehicle technology in Harvard’s Edge Computing Lab — a topic of keen interest for Musk, who has staked the future of his automaker, Tesla, on self-driving vehicles. Shaotran was reportedly a runner-up in a hackathon held by xAI, Musk’s AI company. He, too, has a GSA email and A-suite clearance, including access to the agency’s IT architecture.
And the Rest
In addition to these seven young men, Musk has mobilized more experienced people from his companies and the tech industry at large to reshape the very foundations of U.S. government. Nicole Hollander and her husband, Steve Davis, who together aided Musk’s Twitter takeover, have top roles in DOGE, along with access to federal agency data. Thomas Shedd, installed as director of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, is a longtime Tesla engineer. Brian Bjelde, once vice president of human resources at SpaceX, has a prominent role in DOGE. Christopher Stanley, a security engineer at SpaceX and X, has joined the effort as well. Nikhil Rajpal, an employee of Twitter prior to the Musk takeover who has done design work for Tesla, represents the commission at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a scientific regulator focused on climate and marine protections. Wired reports that Rajpal has demonstrated an interest in libertarian politics, cryptocurrency, and right-wing publications, but has no obvious aptitude for the traditionally nonpartisan work done at NOAA.
Amanda Scales, currently serving as chief of staff at OPM, worked at Uber before joining Musk’s xAI, and has led a hunt for fireable federal employees. The agency’s acting director, Charles Ezell, was previously OPM’s data chief and has a background in software development that includes work at the defense company Northrop Grumman. Others at OPM include Riccardo Biasini, who worked as an engineer for Musk’s tunneling corporation, the Boring Co.; and Anthony Armstrong, a banker who advised on the Twitter acquisition. Stephen Ehikian, named acting administrator of the GSA immediately after Trump’s inauguration, does not appear to have a direct link to Musk, but is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur in the AI space.
These staffing decisions reflect the extraordinary degree to which Silicon Valley has aligned itself with Trump’s agenda, Musk’s belief in the power of data analytics and AI software to immediately alter the mechanics of government administration, and how a “move fast and break things” ethos has completed its migration from startup culture to the Beltway. Agencies including the Department of Labor and the Department of Education are likely to face DOGE’s wrecking ball in the near future — according to the recommendations of tech careerists who think they know better than federal workers with years or even decades on the job. The catastrophic results of their slashing are already plain to see, but haven’t given them a moment’s pause as yet.
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