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Harvard senior, Northeastern first-year student reportedly among Musk’s DOGE team
Harvard senior Ethan Shaotran and Northeastern first-year student Edward Coristine were both identified as having previous links to Elon Musk.
Students from Harvard and Northeastern are among six young men under the age of 24 who have been identified as “critical” to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to a report from WIRED.
Harvard senior Ethan Shaotran and Northeastern first-year student Edward Coristine were both identified as having previous links to Musk. Shaotran, 22, was runner-up at a hackathon from xAI, Musk’s AI company, while Coristine was a summer intern last year at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, according to WIRED.
Musk is in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump administration task force established through a Jan. 20 executive order. The task force is assigned to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” including by laying off federal workers and cutting programs and budgets. Musk called DOGE “the wood chipper for bureaucracy” on X Monday.
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Shaotran received a $100,000 grant from OpenAI to develop an AI scheduling assistant, he wrote in Business Insider last fall. According to his Harvard profile, he’s a student cross-registered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School. He founded Energize.AI, which appears to have been taken down.
Coristine is enrolled at Northeastern as a mechanical engineering and physics major, according to the university’s database. WIRED reported that Coristine is an “expert” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
The Boston Globe reported that Coristine is 19 years old, born in December of 2005, citing public records.
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WIRED reported that both men also have government email accounts, as well as physical and clearance IT access to the General Services Administration.
Coristine was added to calls using a nongovernment Gmail address where GSA employees were asked to go over code they had written and justify their jobs, WIRED reported. Employees weren’t told who Coristine was or why he was present.
On Friday, representatives with DOGE gained access to the federal payment system, which handles about $6 trillion annually. WIRED reported that Musk’s team now has access to classified, sensitive, and personal information of tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more.
Sen. Ed Markey and supporters rallied outside the Treasury Department to protest DOGE’s access.
“Members of Congress were denied access to the very building where Musk’s minions have been allowed to root around in American’s personal data,” Markey said. “No one elected Elon Musk.”
Shaotran and Coristine didn’t return requests for comment.
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