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Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’
Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI.
As America’s most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, worrying about their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between US senator and UAE ambassador, Elon Musk sat staring at his phone, laughing. Many of these operatives would show up later at agencies across the federal government—people like Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley graduate and former intern at Palantir, the defense contractor cofounded by Peter Thiel; Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who has gone by the online nickname “Big Balls”; and Nikhil Rajpal, an engineer in his 30s who had worked at Twitter during Musk’s acquisition, where he’d once pitched the idea of auctioning off dormant usernames to the highest bidder. While Trump was busy lobbying House Republicans to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government afloat until September, WIRED reported that Musk had expressed interest in a shutdown—in part because doing so would potentially make it easier to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
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