Meet the zoomers aiding Musk’s government takeover
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We allowed them to create essentially like weird pseudo religions that they all believe in and effectively groom generations of young men to fall on their footsteps. And now they're all invading Washington.

Over the past week, Elon Musk has been engaged in a near wholesale takeover of key areas of the U.S. government. Working under the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk and a team of young loyalists have been wreaking havoc on our institutions. Last weekend, they gained access to highly sensitive government databases containing the social security numbers, medical history, and more information on members of the American public.

Musk and his crew have also gained access to the U.S. Treasury's payment systems. On Monday, staffers for the U.S. Agency of International Development, or USAID, were completely shut out of their offices and email accounts. All USAID systems and operations were halted, jeopardizing the safety of staffers around the world. This takeover is being led by Musk, but he's recruited a group of broccoli-haired Zoomers with little to no government experience to help enact his plans.

These 19-25 year olds are suddenly playing critical roles in Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. And though these young men are now federal servants, Musk has gone to great lengths to hide their identities. He has falsely claimed that naming them is illegal and on Monday he began banning accounts that tweeted about them, calling it doxing.

Doxing used to mean publishing somebody's private information, like their social security number or their home address. And to be clear, I still think that's very wrong. But now, conservatives are trying to claim that it means simply naming public servants. I think that revealing the identities of the Gen Z men who are now playing a crucial role in our federal government is very much in the public interest.

These are teenagers, in some cases, who have been given an extreme amount of power and authority over our federal institutions nearly overnight with absolutely no public vetting. They are at the center of a government takeover, working at the behest of a powerful unelected billionaire. We should know their names. To break down who these men are and what exactly Elon Musk is doing to the United States government, I brought in online culture reporter Ryan Broderick.

Ryan has been covering all this and more on his newsletter, Garbage Day. Ryan, welcome to Power User. Hi, thanks for having me. So I want to talk about this group of young men who's carrying out Elon's marching orders through Doge. You wrote recently that this team of former iPad babies and incels have not only compromised the OPM and GSA, reportedly hooking up an illegal server to access federal information,

employment databases, but they're currently blocking staffer access to U.S. aid. And over the weekend, they successfully infiltrated the U.S. Treasury's payment system. Why do you think it's important for us to know who these people are? Simply, they're working for Elon Musk. Elon Musk is trying to carry out a bunch of illegal maneuvers. They're aiding and abetting. He is not someone who cares deeply or thinks deeply about any of this stuff. He is assigning former interns of his.

to these things. And based on what I've read is that a lot of the times they're just appearing on Zoom calls without even explaining who they are or what they're doing. These are not experts in anything. These are children. They are definitely young adults, I think, that have an enormous amount of power and ultimately they're unelected and playing a pretty crucial role in government.

Yeah. I mean, the youngest one is 19 and I think the oldest one is 24. All right. So let's meet some of these young gentlemen. To start off, we have Edward Korostein. He is a 19 year old former camp counselor who also recently graduated from Northeastern University. He interned at Neuralink and he's currently working in some capacity, both at the

OPM and General Services Administration. Ryan, you also reported that this guy had an interesting nickname. Did you find out anything about his background? Yeah, so his nickname online is Big Balls. From what I've read, he's a volunteer. This one seems to be the most nebulous of...

all of them like no one's really sure what he's doing but he's he's around yeah he seems kind of fabulous um i think he has an interesting internet presence he was tweeting under a handle that had a giant like humpty dumpty egg that also appeared to maybe be mark andreessen he's also potentially part canadian his father is a canadian businessman who left his wall street job to buy the snack company lesser evil which now has 103 million dollar revenue so he's kind of a rich kid

We don't really know what this guy has done. Wired reported that he was appearing on calls where workers were made to go over code that they had written to justify their jobs. And he was added to another GSA staff call, basically just using his Gmail address.

So no one was given any explanation, but this random 19-year-old is just appearing on government calls now. So next we have Akash Boba, a 22-year-old. He interned at Meta and Palantir. He attended UC Berkeley, where he was in a kind of prestigious management, entrepreneurship, and technology program. According to his LinkedIn, which has now been deleted, he was an engineering intern at

Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring. And he was a featured guest on a since deleted podcast, which was hosted by another Gen Z engineer. And they basically talked about how they landed their dream jobs. I think it's kind of funny because this guy has been sucked up into Indian internet and

Already, there's a bunch of weird SEO, like Economic Times articles about him. And it's like, meet the young Indian that's like disrupting the U.S. government. He's very interesting because Peter Thiel's fingerprints are all over that. And I think a lot of the soup that these guys come from is that kind of like young Silicon Valley defense contractor reactionary, you know, corner of society. Like all of these guys have connections.

meta and palantir in their linkedins in some capacity a bunch of his classmates were tweeting positively about him though one former classmate said let me tell you something about akash during a project at berkeley i accidentally deleted our entire code base two days before deadline i panicked akash just stared at the screen shrugged and rewrote everything from scratch in one night better than before we submitted it early and got first in class many such stories i trust him with everything i own

Both Boba and Korstein are listed in internal government records as experts, and they report directly to Amanda Scales, OPM's new chief of staff. Moving on, we have Gavin Klieger. I might be mispronouncing all of these people's names, by the way. This is a 25-year-old who also attended UC Berkeley. Most recently, according to his LinkedIn, he worked for an AI company called Databricks.

He was a software engineer at Twitter before Elon Musk took over. And of course, he has a sub stack. I don't know, Ryan, if you had a chance to review it at all. Yeah, there's like two posts and they look like they were both written by AI. His major outlet online seems to be Twitter, where he was a big fan of sharing posts from Nick Fuentes, the far right influencer.

influencer among other nasty kind of Trumpian people. So if there's any question of like where these guys align politically, there shouldn't be. Yeah, this guy seems sort of overtly to promote pretty far right wing extremists. I mean, Nick Fuentes is...

almost as far as you can get. His posts also seem pretty conspiratorial. He wrote the curious case of Matt Gaetz, how the deep state destroys its enemies, as well as another one titled Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, the warrior Washington fears. He, of course, has no previous government experience. And when all of this came out and his name was leaked by Wired, he published another Substack post for, I think it was a $10,000 annual paywall for

titled "Why Doge?" and somebody on Reddit, I guess, paid or got around the paywall and it's just a blank post. So he's trolling people. I mean, that's pretty funny. That's pretty good actually. I support that. Also, you know, in addition to his boosting of Nick Fuentes' Groyper content, Travis Brown, investigative journalist on Blue Sky, posted that Gavin has also been responding to literal Nazis, like open white supremacist fascist Nazis.

So his online footprint is kind of controversial. Next, we have Ethan Chow Tran, a 23-year-old. He was recently profiled actually by Business Insider back in September, talking about how he was a senior at Harvard studying computer science and the founder of an open AI-backed startup called Energize AI.

I think it's really funny that this kid already has one of these like BI hustle articles. I don't know if you saw it, Ryan, but the headline is, I'm a Harvard senior who balances college and my open AI-backed startup through these three productivity tips. One is time blocks. One is using an AI note taker. And the third is planned distractions, which I didn't really understand, but it's basically...

going to the gym in the evening. Oh, sure. Yeah, no, of course. He's definitely in the like Musk Altman world. He was the runner up at a hackathon held by XAI, Elon Musk's AI company. He received $100,000 grant from OpenAI to build his scheduling assistant Spark. And he's also written books.

which I cannot tell if or where these were ever published, but they're available on Amazon. Stock Prediction with Deep Learning was his most recent book, and Stories from 2045, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. He also built, I would say he doesn't have any government experience, but he did work on building ballot proof, which is a ballot security system that takes input images of the front and back sides of your ballot and uses image analysis to determine which errors prevent your critical vote from being counted.

I can't wait to have to use that in a couple years to vote before they like disqualify all of our votes. That'll be very fun. Next we have Gautier Cole Killian. He is a 24 year old. He's mostly known online as Cole Killian and he has a working email associated with Doge where he's also currently listed as a volunteer. According to his now deleted resume, he graduated high school in 2019 and attended McGill at least through 2021.

His website indicates that he worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, which specializes in algorithmic and high-frequency financial trades. His former website lists his interests as utilitarianism, effective altruism, rationalism, closed individualism, absurdism, Pyronian skepticism, meta-rationalism, empty individualism. Yeah, no, those are my interests as well. That's what my Tinder account looks like, actually.

Can you explain effector vultureism? Yeah, very simply. It's the idea that you can...

use an equation to solve for the maximum human happiness so you can apply engineering and mathematic and economic principles to create the most amount of happiness for the world possible and a lot of effector activists are like yeah we should just like invest in mosquito nets but then a lot of them like sam bigger free are like no we should make a stupid cryptocurrency and

and use that to give everybody money in the form of UBI. That's the major sort of tenant of the philosophy. - Moving on, we have Luke Ferreter. He is a 23 year old Teal Fellow and former SpaceX intern. According to his LinkedIn, he dropped out of the University of Nebraska. While he was in school, he was part of this award-winning team that deciphered portions of an ancient Greek scroll

and won them actually $700,000, which he received a part of. He also has a working GSA email address. They're all definitely one degree of separation away from each other. The final one, which was revealed kind of after the initial six, we have Marco L.

a 25-year-old engineer who previously worked for two of Musk's companies. And he graduated from Rutgers in 2021. He worked for SpaceX for a little, focused on satellite software, then moved on to working at X, where he's worked on search AI. And he has now direct access

access to the Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government. He has admin privileges over the code that controls social security payments, tax returns and more. These systems have processed $4.7 trillion of payments in last year alone. And people are really worried that these admin privileges could allow him to bypass really crucial security measures and cause irreversible damage to these systems.

Yes, that is the major question with all of this, which is like, how much should we be freaking out about this? Because I've heard, yes, some of them have admin access and they've hooked up an illegal server, which is a security risk. I've also read arguments saying that a lot of what they're doing is the equivalent of like deleting a spreadsheet column and assuming that the money there goes with it, which is not true. I think also Elon Musk wants

us to freak out and assume that he's accomplishing things when we know that he's incapable of accomplishing anything. And I want to kind of talk about this because once these kids identities were revealed, there was so much backlash online and people were really quick to attack them. Obviously, Elon Musk was deleting anybody that posted about them. But I guess I'm wondering, like, how harmful is it? Because I mean, is it not a good thing just to play devil's advocate to have a bunch of young entrepreneurial smart kids

coming in and kind of disrupting the government. And I mean, yeah, they're in their early 20s, but Lena Kahn was...

I think only 29 or 30 when she was appointed. And you know, it's not to say that young people can't achieve great things in the government, right? Ironically enough, in the beginning years of the Kennedy administration, there was like a push for like young American technocrats to come to DC and like modernize the government. I read this great piece years ago about how a lot of the blueprint for NASA started with the post office where like in the 1800s, they were like building rockets to shoot mail across the country. Like,

There's always been moments where the government is a place where it excites young Americans and they want to go work there. That's not what this is. The problem with the way this is working is that the personnel management system, OPM, that they've sort of worked their way into and the General Services Administration that they've worked their way into and the Treasury that they've worked their way into manage trillions of dollars for hundreds of thousands of government employees and contractors now.

And if those systems get screwed up, I mean, that means the difference between my retired parents getting their Social Security payment. That's why Elon Musk is targeting these services. The question is, is he going to do anything to them? We don't know yet. Yeah. I think that a lot of this harm is potentially hypothetical. But then you have the situation with USAID, which one of these Zoomers actually sent an email to a bunch of

USAID employees in DC saying don't come to work on Monday. A lot of them have lost access to their email already. And I know he said that he wants to shut it down. It's not clear if that's legal. So I guess isn't he already sort of causing some harm? The way he's found his way in here is by setting up a temporary organization, DOGE, inside of essentially like the digital services department of the government.

And he's attacking the digital services of the other departments that he doesn't like. So he's working with OPM via Amanda Scales, who is a former employee of his. And she's running OPM and sort of taking control of the different services and the personnel level. So that's where you're getting, you know, the requirements to take the pronouns out of your bio and the not buyouts that are being sent out to employees. They're messing with the HR department that way. So he's messing with

the digital sort of services of all of these government agencies and the HR services of these government agencies? Right. Like he wasn't really involved with the CDC fiasco last week, but he wasn't not involved either. And like, let's say the CDC website went down. That doesn't mean the CDC is over. But he's deleted tons of really essential information off the website, data sets that scientists rely on. Like, you know, people are unable to get grants because of this. So isn't that sort of

of harm in itself. You're right. He doesn't seem to have the unilateral power, right, to shut down these government agencies completely. But he still seems to be wreaking havoc. He's absolutely wreaking havoc. And I'm not downplaying that. But I do think it's important, especially because we're in Trump world now. So like he is not the only player here. He has rivals in the other factions that are taking over the government right now.

Project 2025 and him are not aligned. He is working alongside Russ Vought, the co-author of Project 2025, but he is trying to make sure that Doge looks like it's doing things. He has no ability to tell USAID workers not to show up to their office. It would be like if the IT guy in your office was like, no one can come to work anymore.

He can send that email and cause that chaos, but he can't actually make you not go to work. But if that IT guy has disabled your employee badge and your email and has the support of the head of the company, it's kind of hard to say no. Well, but our government also like has different branches. And I think this is what's been really frustrating me since all of this chaos started, which is that like we are not in a monarchy. Okay. Like I was reading headlines today about like Donald Trump's going to get rid of the Department of Education.

So I was like, OK, is that even possible? And I spent a couple like I spent like about an hour looking into it. No, an executive order cannot get rid of the Department of Education. You can just say no. You can be like, no, USA does exist. Well, isn't that more of a messaging problem than from Democrats? Because I think

I think, first of all, I really think it's important not to downplay the level of chaos that this man has caused already in the government. Like, I get what you're saying. He can't unilaterally shut down the CDC. But the harm that he's caused is irreparable and will take years to untangle. If we're talking about specifics to what he's done to USAID, yeah, he has disabled the security app that USAID workers use.

terrible. He has gunked up how the HR system works. I think it is just very important to be very specific that Elon Musk and his team of Gen Z sociopaths can only impact digital services. And they are turning that around to Trump supporters and trying to make them believe that they have deleted USAID. But those digital services are also quite essential to operationally sort of

functioning governments. And it is, but you're right, sure, they cannot just delete an entire government agency. So, Ryan, can you talk about like what they have caused harm to? Because I think you've said, you know, it's important to make this distinction between what Elon Musk and his little crony, Gen Z cronies have been able to do and what they're unable to do, theoretically, under the sort of current laws. Is there any effort to stop his influence or to sort of control the reach of Doge?

No, it started today. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat, is holding a rally, I think, as we're recording this. They are at the Treasury Department. Elizabeth Warren is getting out there and calling this a coup. And it is. And one of the biggest risks right now is time.

The more that they can worm their way into these systems and the more that they can confuse people, even if what they're saying is totally illegal and they have no jurisdiction to do it, if employees in the government don't know or are just following it, then yeah, that's the problem. The major thing here, we saw this with the videos in South Korea during their coup. You have a brief moment to hold the legality of this thing together, and if you don't, you're screwed. Definitely.

Democrats are finally beginning to move on this, but it's taken them about a week and a half. I think you also wrote recently about the different sort of warring factions within the Trump world. Can you talk about the kind of three different groups at play here and how they're at odds with each other? Yeah. So I pulled this from, uh, Ben Collins, former NBC news reporter, current CEO of the onion. I have to say that whole thing. Cause citing him as the onion CEO kind of like diminishes it a bit, I think, but I love you, Ben. Uh,

And he was really smart to point this out, which is that Trump World is a reality show. Even as frightening and as quickly efficient as it's become, it is a reality show full of different factions and palace intrigue. And so right now we have effectively Stephen Miller looking over immigration. He's the one that is absolutely pushing for Guantanamo Bay to become a concentration camp and the ICE raids. And that's been his thing for like 10 years now.

The second faction would be Russ Vought, the co-author of Project 2025. I would call these guys like the demagogues, the like true blood and soil white nationalists. And they have been planning the Project 2025 takeover for years.

And they're very ideological. And they're across the gamut. Like if these guys succeed, we're in Handmaid's Tale. And right now, these guys are focusing on the office of management and budget. And they're trying to do that as step one to effectively render Congress useless. They want to sort of

Pull as much power away from the other branches, put it to Trump. And that way, when people start complaining that Elon Musk is breaking the law, there's no one that can do anything. Right. And then faction three would be Elon Musk and Doge. And they, I think, are the the honestly the one to worry about the least.

because they have no political anything. Like none of them have been endorsed. None of them have been nominated or voted for. And they're not even working within the government. They are effectively contractors working under a subgroup of a subgroup. And I'm much more frightened by the Project 2025 guys and Stephen Miller because they are already succeeding.

I saw this headline today talking about how one of Musk's allies had told staff that the future of the government is AI first and how they need to sort of operate the government like a software company. Is it this like monarchy-like network state? Are they trying to run the business like an AI startup? Like what do they sort of hope to achieve? Part of me thinks the AI thing is like his weird beef with Sam Altman and he's just trying to like get one step ahead of open AI because he hates them. But I will say it does reflect a

an urge in Silicon Valley to create an AI-powered network state. And they believe that China already is this, and they believe that they're in an arms race to create a nation-level AI. I also think, quite selfishly, Elon Musk wants to power the whole government itself.

via X. He wants to replace the dollar with crypto and have the crypto run through X wallets. And he wants to have XAI working, you know, on whatever. And that is to me what

his role really is, is that he is trying to slash and destroy and dismantle as many government digital services as possible and then replace them with his own bad version. It's kind of funny because I feel like a lot of the government used to run on Twitter, ironically, before Elon took it over. Like all of the government agencies had accounts. That's kind of how you used to get a bunch of really crucial like government updates and stuff. And it was Elon Musk's takeover and the verification stuff that made a lot of them leave, right? That's absolutely correct. Uh,

because he wanted to own it. He didn't want them to use it. He wants to own them. He wants control. And this is what he's been doing forever. He wants to replace NASA with SpaceX, and he wants to replace...

public transportation with Tesla and he wants to replace the government email list serves with X. I just feel like he is so fundamentally annoying. I can't imagine this going on for four years. Like, do you see any world where like he ultimately just like, yeah, pisses off the wrong project 2025 person. Trump gets tired of him stealing all the headlines. Like how long do you think this reign of Musk is going to last? Or do you think his like political power will be neutered in any way?

So far, the legal response to all of the Trump administration has been pretty good. Like you have to you have to sort of reflect on the fact that like America is like a pretty healthy legal institution. And even if our Supreme Court's mega conservative, like we have these branches, they work pretty well. And like we survived, sort of survived the first Trump administration. And right now, like most of the major executive orders that Trump's passing are being blocked. And it makes me fairly optimistic about the longevity of Doge.

because they are legit breaking the law. Like, they just are. And those laws still exist for now. Where do you think these Zoomers that are working within Doge go? Do you think that they will ultimately be absorbed into the Trump government? Are most of them just LARPing, getting another line item on their resume, and they'll just go back into, like, Silicon Valley world? I think they will just go back. Yeah, I really...

What we're sort of seeing in the last month or two is this culture in Silicon Valley that we did nothing to stop. We didn't break up these monopolies. We allowed them to create essentially like weird pseudo religions that they all believe in and effectively groom generations of young men to fall on their footsteps. And now they're all invading Washington. That's where these kids come from. And that's where these kids go back. And we can't do anything about that for at least eight years, let's say. We have to like really overhaul that.

the government and regulate those companies and like get back on track to like break that culture. But unfortunately those ghouls are going to be with us for a long time.

What do you think Mark Zuckerberg and the other tech CEOs sort of feel about this? Do you see any of them trying to assert any influence over Doge or whatever? I mean, I feel like Musk has been able to so successfully worm his way into power in this administration in a way that the other CEOs have not. I sort of see Mark Zuckerberg as like not an idiot. I have to imagine that most of the people...

of like his worlds are looking at Elon Musk as like a carnival barker, insane person. To me, it reeks of a side of like being a sideshow. Cause I don't think any reasonable person at that, even like at the highest levels of Silicon Valley can like look at X and be like, that's good. Like, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg would want Facebook to run like X. I don't think so. I think X is so bad and crazy that it gives him cover to do things like roll back ads.

fact checking or things like that he's probably wanted to do for a while and can now or like sell verification, right? And things like that. I mean, there was that report. I think it was about the Musk sort of complaining internally about declining user numbers. And I don't think that X is a fundamentally healthy platform.

No. And in fact, like if I were someone like Zuckerberg watching this, I would just be waiting for it to implode and then go send a bunch of people to D.C. to sell government like to buy government contracts or whatever. I have to assume like the Jeff Bezos is the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world are waiting to scoop up the damage like the wreckage and buy it or, you know, get like some cush contract out of it when it's.

Elon Musk embarrasses himself or gets thrown in jail or whatever. Yeah, or maybe hire some of these 23-year-olds to go work at Meta. Hey, if you want a kid vaping on your Zoom call, they'd be perfect for that. I'm curious also what you think is going to happen to the tech landscape under Trump. Obviously, Musk is probably going to enrich himself and we're all going to have to use X for a few more years. But the TikTok thing,

ban stuff is coming up. I mean, I feel like there was only that 90 day stay. Like, what do you think is the future of TikTok as a platform under Trump? I think it stays in it and it, and it has very American tweaks. Uh,

How do you think it'll stay? Do you think he'll force part of it to sell? Yeah, I think so. And I think TikTok will do it. TikTok already is extremely aggressive about tracking your country. I could see them easily carving off an American TikTok. And to answer your question more broadly, I just think tech in America, which is already quite bad compared to the rest of the world, is going to get really stagnant. The apps that people are using in Asia or Europe or South America are

light years ahead of what we see. And I think it's only just going to get more pronounced under Trump. What do you think people should keep in mind when they see these endless headlines about Elon Musk or these 19 year olds, you know, taking power from the government and Trump doing X, Y, Z executive order? I think there are a lot of people who are not seeing these headlines. But if you are, if you're seeing a headline that says like Donald Trump is getting rid of the Department of Education, you should just take a second and be like, OK, is that possible?

The only way forward here is to not get sucked into the craziness, is to remind yourself that like, we still have laws. We can still check these people out. We can still arrest them. I have been in countries that have gone through a dictatorship, through coups, and the malaise is the killer.

You're talking about an event horizon you reach where you feel like nothing can be changed. And that doesn't go away when you get out of the dictatorship 20 or 30 years later. Yeah, you just have to keep your head on straight because like it is hard, man. It is really hard. I am an eternal optimist, so I'm delusional about everything. So I'm like, it's probably going to be fine. Right.

but I am too, to a degree, actually. I think I also don't like the reflexive panic that you see from a lot of like liberal influencers. And I don't think that we're going to get the same level of like resistance grifter type people that we had during the first Trump presidency. I think we're starting to see a few, uh,

Oh, no. Blossom right now, actually, if you go on to bsky.app and check it out. That would be a shame if that ecosystem reemerged because there was so much misinformation and there was so much sort of like panic towards the wrong things. I mean, back then it was all like this focus on Russia and like Russia put Trump in power. And I just I hope that this time around people can sort of get better news sources and not

like immediately spiral while also taking it seriously. We should take it seriously that what these people are doing. But as you said, we do still have somewhat of a functioning government left. So yeah, we can still drink the tap water like in most parts of America. Not everywhere. Not everywhere. But most of them, you know, we can,

The things that really worry me are the Supreme Court level stuff and the genuinely nominated politicians that are being put into power. Even in a coup, there are still laws for a little bit. And so we've got to say, okay, what is possible, what's not? And hopefully the media gets a little better at communicating that as well. I feel like that would be nice. I also hope some of these Zoomers are good actors. I don't know. They seem sort of...

to authentically want to help. And so I hope that they do, you know, they don't cause too much harm. Hey, if your young person wants to get involved in government, go barricade yourself to the door of the USAID office and help people break through and get in there. Then you'll get a job in the office when we fix the government. All right, Ryan. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thanks.

Thanks for having me. All right. That's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. That's at Taylor Lorenz on YouTube. And please subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.co. If you like the show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. See you then.