 "Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) is gaining sweeping access to sensitive government information. And at the centre of it all are six engineers who make up his Doge team. They are aged between 19 and 24. File image/AFP")
In the days since Donald Trump took the oath as US president, his ‘First Buddy’ Elon Musk has begun his ‘slow takeover’ of the federal government through his work at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
The Tesla chief and Doge chief has begun swinging his wrecking ball at the US government — taking control of the US Treasury’s payment system , which manages trillions of dollars, announcing that the United States Agency for International Development, USAID , “must die” and driving out top officials from the government.
At the centre of all this is Musk’s Doge team, which is made up of six men, who are aged between 19 and 24, have little to no government experience. The Wired has now revealed the identities of these ‘Muskovites’, adding that most of them have connections to Musk, while at least two have connections to Musk’s longtime associate Peter Thiel, a cofounder and chair of the analytics firm and government contractor Palantir who has long expressed opposition to democracy.
But who exactly are these 6 Doge members? We unravel this mystery.
Akash Bobba
According to The Wired, one of the six engineers at Doge is 21-year-old Indian-American Akash Bobba. After completing his education at West Windsor Plainsboro High School, a public school, he attended UC Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology programme. As per a report in The Telegraph, at his graduation in 2021, he urged classmates to “seek discomfort”.
“We live in an age where simplicity reigns supreme, where 30-second TikToks and 280-character tweets come to define our identities,” he then said. “This increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits, perpetuates misinformation and in the process divides the communities, families, and relationships we cherish. What’s the solution, you might ask? Seek discomfort.”
His now-deleted Linkedin profile shows that following his graduation, Bobba took up an investment at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund. He was also an intern at both Meta and Palantir.
Now, Bobba shows up in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) records as an expert. As Bobba’s inclusion in Doge was made public, several previous Berkeley students praised him, calling him “one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever met”.
Another student who studied at UC Berkeley, identified as Charis Zhang wrote on X, “Let me tell you something about Akash. During a project at Berkeley, I accidentally deleted our entire codebase two days before the deadline. I panicked. Akash just stared at the screen, shrugged, and rewrote everything from scratch in one night — better than before. We submitted early and got first in the class. Many such stories. I trust him with everything I own.”
Edward Coristine
Coristine, as per OMP records, is also tagged as an expert. The 19-year-old appears to be the son of Charles Coristine — the man who bought over LesserEvil, a failing food company, and transformed it into a success story.
He is believed to have been @edwardbigballer on X and recently graduated from school and enrolled at Northeastern University. His resume boasts of him working for three months at Neuralink , Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer.
According to The Wired report, Coristine “has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.”
Luke Farritor
Twenty-three-year-old Farritor found himself at Doge after being an intern at Musk’s SpaceX. His LinkedIn profile also shows that he is a recipient of the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship for young entrepreneurs.
He used AI to partially decipher a 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scroll from Pompeii — part of the Vesuvius scrolls — which had stumped scientists for centuries.
Earlier, he had told The Free Press that he dropped out of college to begin working for the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub and Xamarin.
Gautier Cole Killian
Currently, Killian is listed as a volunteer to Doge. The Wired found out that he attended McGill University until at least 2021 and graduated high school in 2019. Also, he worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, which specialises in algorithmic and high-frequency financial trades.
Gavin Kliger
Kliger on his LinkedIn profile has mentioned OMP to be his employer where he works as a “special advisor to the director”. Kliger made news in his Doge role as the New York Times reported that it was Kliger who sent out the staff-wide email to USAID workers that ordered them to work from home as the agency is scrutinised by Doge and the Trump Administration.
After attending UC Berkeley, he worked for the AI company Databricks, which earned him a seven-figure salary, and also had a minor stint at X, which was then known as Twitter in 2019.
On Substack, he has two posts that have captured eyeballs; one titled ‘The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies’ and the other being ‘Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.’
Ethan Shaotran
Last but not least is Ethan Shaotran, the 22-year-old startup founder. After graduating from Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, in 2020, he made his way to Harvard University.
In a Business Insider report last year, Shaotran said that he was a senior at Harvard studying computer science and also the founder of an OpenAI-backed startup, Energize AI. In 2023, his start-up, which is a scheduling assistant for professionals, was awarded a $100,000 grant from OpenAI.
Shaotran was also the runner-up in a hackathon held by xAI, Musk’s AI company.
Musk’s initial anger at identities revealed
When the identities of Doge members first came to light, Musk appeared to be furious and wrote on X, “You have committed a crime”. It was later deleted and the account of the individual who had named the six had been suspended.
On Monday (February 3), a key Trump appointee, Attorney Ed Martin, attached a letter to Musk’s profile, writing, “Please see this important letter. We will not tolerate threats against Doge workers or law-breaking by the disgruntled. All the best. Ed Martin.”
A part of the letter said, “I recognise that some of the staff at Doge has been targeted publicly. At this time, I ask that you utilise me and my staff to assist in protecting the Doge work and the Doge workers. Any threats, confrontations, or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws.”
Musk later said that it was “time to confess” that the “media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true.”
With inputs from agencies