The inexperienced young engineers supporting Elon Musk's government acquisition.

Elon Musk continues his acquisition of government infrastructure, where a group of young engineers, some of whom are recent graduates and even one case that is still in college, hold key positions. Many of these engineers have direct links to Musk, and at least two of them are connected to Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, a data analytics firm and government contractor known for its stance against democracy.

Six men have been identified, all between the ages of 19 and 24, who have little or no experience in the public sector and are now playing critical roles in a project called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created by executive order to "modernize federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency and productivity." The positions these engineers occupy are vague, and at least one is listed as a volunteer. The mentioned engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran, and none have responded to requests for comments.

So far, Musk’s associates have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the General Services Administration (GSA), and they have even gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which could allow them to access a vast amount of sensitive information about millions of citizens and businesses. Recently, it was reported that DOGE staff attempted to improperly access classified information at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the security officials who prevented access were placed on administrative leave.

Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, has noted that what is happening is unprecedented, as individuals who are not government officials are gaining access to very sensitive government data. In his view, this feels like a hostile takeover of the government machinery by the richest man in the world.

Akash Bobba was studying at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was part of a prestigious program. He previously interned at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and also worked at Meta and Palantir. Edward Coristine appears to have recently completed high school and has been enrolled at Northeastern University, in addition to interning at Neuralink, Musk's brain-computer interface company, last summer.

Luke Farritor, a former intern at SpaceX, is currently a Thiel Fellow, having dropped out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Gavin Kliger is a special advisor at the OPM and has worked at the company Databricks. Gautier Cole Killian, also known as Cole Killian, is a volunteer at DOGE and has previously worked at Jump Trading. Ethan Shaotran is a student at Harvard and the founder of a startup backed by OpenAI.

Concerns about the lack of experience of these young people in managing such complex agencies have emerged among several academics. Additionally, there are fears that these new teams may bypass established security protocols and access sensitive information. This pattern of hiring tech executives in government raises questions about regulatory capture and whether these individuals may have interests that do not serve the American public.