Edward Coristine’s old school friends always thought he was a little bit different. But none could have predicted his mysterious ascent to the top of Elon’s Musk’s army of DOGE nerds waging war on America’s bloated bureaucracy.
Raised in Larchmont, a wealthy town in Westchester County outside New York City, as the son of a popcorn baron, he was a junior at $50,000-per-year Rye Country Day School when he earned his now-infamous nickname.
His bored math classmates were passing a note around, and when it got to him ‘he drew a phallic object and wrote BIG BALLS on it’.
‘Then a math teacher took it out of his hands and read it out loud to the class. Then I guess he embraced it because he changed his LinkedIn name to that,’ a current student who heard the story told New York Magazine.
Now 19, he is senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and Office of Personnel Management, both at the behest of his mentor, and his Big Balls moniker has become a CNN talking point.
He and five other ‘Muskrats’, all under 26, are acolytes of the billionaire ‘First Buddy’ enlisted in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Working into the night alongside Musk, sleeping on office couches, and surviving on pizza and Red Bull, they have helped fire thousands of public servants and induced at least 30,000 into accepting buyouts.
One of their first acts was being ushered inside the USAID offices and helping dismantle the longstanding foreign aid agency.
Edward Coristine, the most baby-faced of Elon Musk ‘s baby-faced nerds waging war on the public service
One of Musk’s other nerds, Gavin Kliger, 26, was the one who sent the infamous email telling all USAID staff to stay home from work on the day the end began.
Coristine personally made headlines for being on calls where federal workers were told to justify their jobs by explaining their biggest ‘wins’, and inquired about replacing staff with AI.
Friends say Coristine’s accidental nickname is apt due to the way he conducts himself and the risks he took in his short career.
Chief among them was bailing on Northeastern University in Boston, where he was studying mechanical engineering and physics, to work at DOGE.
He answered a call from Musk for ‘super-high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week’ willing to work for no pay.
Likely the youngest to get the gig, he probably first came on Musk’s radar with a three-month internship at Neuralink – the Tesla billionaire’s daring brain chip venture – during his last year of school.
Coristine was also once involved with ‘The Con’, a web of Telegram and Discord channels functioning as a social network for cybercriminals.
He went by the online handle ‘JoeyCrafter’ and in November 2022 said he was ‘looking for a capable, powerful, and reliable L7’ – a powerful type of cyberattack tool.
Coristine is now a senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and Office of Personnel Management, both at the behest of his mentor Elon Musk
The website of the Telegram channel he used to make the request, known as ‘Dstat’, was seized during an international law enforcement operation against cybercrime.
Earlier in June 2022, he was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Networks, which helps companies defend against the exact type of hack he was asking for a tool to pull off himself.
‘Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors. This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this,’ one of its bosses wrote in a Discord channel staff used.
Marshal Webb, the founder of Path Networks, added: ‘The penalty for consorting with the enemy.
‘I can confirm that Edward Coristine’s brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,’ the company told Bloomberg.
Weeks later, Coristine was bragging elsewhere on Discord, where he went by the handle ‘Rivage’, that he still had access to the firm’s servers.
‘I had access to every single machine,’ he wrote, claiming he could have wiped everything but ‘I never exploited it because it’s just not me’.
Coristine didn’t explicitly deny he was leaking, and insisted he ‘was doing nothing contractually wrong’.
Coristine was fired from cybersecurity firm Path Networks for leaking secrets to competitors
‘Paranoia ended up terminating me,’ he added. ‘He’s (Webb) a manipulator and doesn’t care about the damage he does.
‘He indirectly threatened to raid my home by saying “xyz contractor has had his home raided. Do you understand”?’
Another Path employee told him Webb was ‘disparaging you and calling you a leaker in the chat after you were removed’.
Coristine now has access to sensitive data on tens of millions of Americans through DOGE getting inside multiple departments.
State Department workers have expressed concern over Coristine getting a job at their agency.
They cite the sensitive nature of the data held within the department’s IT bureau and his firing from Path Networks.
‘This is dangerous,’ one anonymous US official told the Washington Post of Coristine’s new access.
The officials who spoke to the outlet shared their worries that the 19-year-old would have access to classified documents.
Protesters gather outside of the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building headquarters of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on February 03, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
The group of federal employees and supporters are protesting against Elon Musk, tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and his aids who have been given access to federal employee personal data and have allegedly locked out career civil servants from the OPM computer systems
They also lamented how Coristine could get compromising materials on other countries and diplomatic activities.
All of the State Department’s data runs through the office Coristine recently was appointed to, which the Post describes as ‘a treasure trove of information.’
‘It’s not like they have a history of informed political opinion,’ an anonymous source who knows Coristine told the outlet.
‘They’re just in it for solving hard problems: It’s like, “Oh, a big challenge, it’s a big puzzle.”
‘I’m sure he just grew up solving puzzles and doing hard problems, and this is just another one and also has the perk of being around the president and billionaires.’
The source shared that though the 19-year-old’s technical ability was good his access to such highly coveted material after such a short tenure with DOGE was cause for concern.
‘It’s not at all appropriate, I don’t think, for something with such a broad impact,’ they shared.
However, Coristine is not the only ‘DOGE bro’ to be given access to State Department data.
Luke Farritor, 23, a colleague of Coristine’s who also works at DOGE, was also found in the department’s directory as an IT bureau employee.
