EXCEPTIONAL: Meet Elon Musk’s Young DOGE Experts

Meet Elon’s young DOGE experts. 

While critics question their inexperience, Musk has defended his squad, boasting that they represent some of the world’s top software engineers, as per the report. His ambitious mission is to completely dismantle wasteful spending, with plans for major cuts and reform that could have lasting implications for US government spending.

The six DOGE team members have been identified as:

Akash Bobba, 21, Edward Coristine, 19, Luke Farritor, 23, Gautier Cole Killian, 24, Gavin Kliger, 25 and Ethan Shaotran, 22.

Over the weekend, Wired publicly named the six young men now playing a critical role at DOGE, raising concerns about their young ages, lack of government experience and access to mountains of sensitive information as they take control key of chokepoints including the Treasury Department’s payments system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA).

“Not many Spartans are needed to win battles,” Mr Musk wrote on X earlier this week.

Luke Farritor, 23. Picture: YouTube

Six baby-faced engineers

The six DOGE team members have been identified as Akash Bobba, 21, Edward Coristine, 19, Luke Farritor, 23, Gautier Cole Killian, 24, Gavin Kliger, 25 and Ethan Shaotran, 22.

The most high-profile of the six, Mr Farritor, made headlines last year as part of a team that won a $US700,000 prize for using artificial intelligence to decipher passages on 2000-year-old papyrus scrolls carbonised by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79AD.

Mr Farritor, a former computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had earlier also won the competition’s $US40,000 “first letters” prize, after he discovered the scroll’s first legible word, “porphyras”, which means “purple” in Ancient Greek.

Akash Bobba, 21. Picture: X

“It was really cool,” he said in a video discussing the win. “It was like, ‘Oh my goodness. We actually detected new writing in the scrolls using AI. That was the moment I realised that this was actually going to work.”

Mr Farritor was in the 2024 Thiel Fellows program, set up by Palantir co-founder and Republican donor Peter Thiel, and has interned at Mr Musk’s SpaceX. He dropped out of university to work for Nat Friedman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind the Vesuvius Challenge.

“Luke Farritor is a national treasure,” Mr Friedman wrote on X after his role at DOGE was made public.

Gavin Kliger, 25. Picture: Substack

Mr Bobba attended UC Berkeley where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology program. He previously interned at hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, as well as Meta and Palantir.

Grata AI chief executive Charis Zhang shared an anecdote about Mr Bobba on X.

“During a project at Berkeley, I accidentally deleted our entire codebase two days before the deadline,” he wrote.

“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, 19. Picture: Reddit

Mr Kliger, the oldest of the group, is also a Berkeley graduate. He most recently worked for AI company Databricks, and publishes a Substack blog called The Weekly Byte, with recent posts titled “The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies” and “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears”.

According to The New York Times, Mr Kliger was behind a controversial company-wide email sent to employees at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) instructing them not to return to work on Monday.

The youngest, Mr Coristine, only recently graduated high school and was enrolled at Northeastern University in Boston where he studied mechanical engineering and physics. He spent three months last year at Neuralink, Mr Musk’s brain-computer interface company, according to a copy of his resume obtained by Wired.

Ethan Shaotran, 22. Picture: X

According to Wired, employees at GSA said Mr Coristine appeared on calls where they were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.

Mr Shaotran founded of Energize AI, a scheduling assistant for professionals, after receiving a $US100,000 grant from OpenAI in 2023.

He told Business Insider in September he was a senior at Harvard University studying computer science, and was reportedly working on autonomous vehicles in the school’s computing lab.

Mr Shaotran also took part in Mr Musk’s xAI “hackathon”, where he and his team were runners-up.

Mr Killian, a former student of Canada’s McGill University, previously worked at Jump Trading, which specialises in algorithmic and high-frequency financial trades.

He is reportedly listed on internal records as a “volunteer” at DOGE.

Gautier Cole Killian, 24. Picture: McGill University

Here is more on these brilliant young men.

These BRILLIANT young men are American heroes!
Just imagine how proud their parents must be!
They are literally making history!

God bless America!
pic.twitter.com/VqVXOtuBAj

— Girl patriot (@Girlpatriot1974) February 12, 2025