Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s DOGE, was fired from his previous job at a cybersecurity company for leaking company secrets, according to a new report from Bloomberg News. Coristine was an intern at Arizona-based Path Network in 2022 when he was fired for allegedly sharing information about the company with a competing company.
“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” a message from June 2022 about the termination seen by Bloomberg News reads. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”
Incredibly, Bloomberg reports that Coristine bragged on Discord about retaining his access to the company not long after being dismissed. The teenager reportedly said that he had “access to every single machine” at Path Network, but said, “I never exploited it because it’s just not me.”
Coristine has become the butt of constant jokes online for previously using the name Big Balls online, but the young man’s access to America’s most sensitive information is no joke. As Wired noted in an article earlier this week, Path Network is known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers. And Coristine is now reportedly rummaging around the networks of federal agencies.
The DOGE team was assembled by Musk to supposedly look for ways to battle waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government, all with the blessing of President Donald Trump, but the reality is much darker. The DOGE soldiers have been ransacking every agency they touch, gaining access to private information and the kinds of things that a foreign adversary would love to get their hands on.
The goal, according to multiple reports, is to shut off funding for things that Musk and Trump don’t like. That’s why USAID is reportedly on the chopping block, with thousands of workers set to be laid off in a completely illegal move that would leave only about 300 staff left. The foreign aid agency has seen its website shut down and employees placed on administrative leave, with promises to obliterate the agency altogether.
But there’s been no accountability for members of DOGE, and the White House said on Wednesday that Musk will police his own conflicts of interest. CBS News reporter Kathryn Watson reported Friday on X that Musk’s financial disclosure forms will not be made public and even sitting senators won’t be able to access the information.
All of this comes as Musk has floated the idea of hiring back a 25-year-old DOGE worker named Marko Elez who was linked to an X account that posted extremely racist material. Elez resigned on Thursday but Musk and Vice President JD Vance suggested on social media Friday he should be brought back onto the team. This afternoon, Musk tweeted that “He will be brought back.”
Reuters published a new article about another DOGE staffer, Gavin Kliger, who was retweeting notorious holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and misogynist Andrew Tate. Both Tate and Fuentes have made Nazi salutes in online videos, something that Musk did twice the day Trump was inaugurated.
Perhaps most alarming in all of the digital incursions by DOGE, CNN has reported that 23-year-old Luke Farritor, a former SpaceX intern, was given access to the Department of Energy, an agency that holds highly sensitive information about the nation’s nuclear weapons. The agency’s general counsel and chief information offices objected but were reportedly overruled.
The new report from Bloomberg about Coristine’s history is alarming but not entirely surprising. Much like Trump, Musk only seems to care about one thing: Loyalty to the leader. If you’re racist, it seems like that’s just a bonus for the billionaire.
