The staff of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency came on the radar for their age after their recent face-off with the security officials and the staff of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Elon Musk and Donald Trump want to put an end to USAID but questions are being raised about whether such young people should have access to the sensitive government data they are looking for; also whether they would even pass government clearance.

Youngest DOGE staff Edward Coristine goes by the name ‘Big Balls’

According to reports, the youngest of DOGE staff as of now is 19-year-old Edward Coristine whose online name is ‘Big Balls’. He established at least five different companies in the last four years with entities registered in Connecticut, Delaware and also the United Kingdom. Coristine briefly worked in 2022 at Path Network, which is known for hiring convicted and reformed hackers.
According to a Wired report, one of the companies Coristine founded in 2021, when he should have been 16 years old, is named Tesla.Sexy LLC. This company controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market,” Wired reported.
Before joining DOGE, Coristine worked for several months in 2024 at Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant startup and now Coristine is listed in the Office of Personnel Management records as an expert at the agency. The 19-year-old reportedly joined calls when employees of the General Services Administration were made to justify their jobs.
Coristine was a freshman engineering major at Northeastern University before he joined DOGE. His friends know him as a very passionate person but are not sure about his political leaning.
“He just thinks Elon [Musk] is a genius entrepreneur and admired his work and wanted to follow his tracks somewhat in the entrepreneurial space,” a source close to Coristine told The Huntington News (Northeastern’s student paper). They confirmed that Musk was the teenager’s “idol.”
A friend also told the paper that Coristine came across as politically “independent,” but didn’t often discuss politics.
“He’s very passionate about what he does,” the friend told the Huntington. “Obviously, he’s super passionate about computer science, and he’s trying to chase that passion. He’s very skillful at it because he’s obviously very accomplished for someone his age, just a freshman in college. He’s already done so much.”
“Through high school, his goal was never really to go to college,” it said. “He really just wanted to build his own thing, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.”
Coristine’s friends from college had no idea that he had dropped out to work for Musk. They added that Coristine suggested he was planning to work for his father, Charles Coristine, who is the CEO of the health snack company LesserEvil.