A 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was fired from an internship at a cybersecurity firm after he was accused of leaking company secrets to a competitor, Bloomberg News reports.
Edward Coristine was “terminated for leaking internal information,” a message from June 2022 from an executive at Path Network stated, according to the outlet.
“This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this,” the message stated.
“I can confirm that Edward Coristine's brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” a spokesperson for the company told Bloomberg on Thursday.
Coristine wrote that he still had access to the company’s computers after leaving the firm, but he added that he hadn’t taken advantage of it.
In a Discord chat in late 2022, he wrote that he had “access to every single machine.” Using the online moniker “Rivage,” the teenager said he could have wiped the company’s servers if he had wanted to.
"I never exploited it because it's just not me,” said Coristine.
The comments were shared in a Discord server that focused on a competitor, which concerned executives at Path Network, who thought there was no reason a former employee should have access to their system, a source told Bloomberg.
Following his removal, Coristine said on Discord that he had done “nothing contractually wrong” during his time at Path Network.
An anonymous White House official told Bloomberg that all DOGE staffers are employees of federal agencies and that they have security clearances. The official added that their work adheres to federal law and that they’re not outside advisers. While the official noted that some of DOGE’s work is seen by some government employees as causing disorder, the official argued that the work was required to carry out President Donald Trump’s agenda.
Democratic lawmakers, however, have questioned if any of the DOGE workers have been vetted, have official security clearance or are even following the law.
“No information has been provided to Congress or the public as to who has been formally hired under DOGE, under what authority or regulations DOGE is operating, or how DOGE is vetting and monitoring its staff and representatives before providing them seemingly unfettered access to classified materials and Americans’ personal information,” Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in a letter Wednesday.
Coristine also interned at Neuralink, which is also operated by Musk. The 19-year-old is part of a number of DOGE staffers who are collecting data on government personnel, contracts, and programs, Bloomberg noted.
He and other colleagues took part in meetings at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the General Services Administration, discussing how they can use the data to replace government employees with artificial intelligence.
It remains unclear what security clearance Coristine has, but on Trump’s first day back in the White House, he signed an executive order to hand top secret and sensitive compartmented information security clearances for a period of six months to some people to allow them to “immediately access the facilities and technology.”
Two U.S. law enforcement officials anonymously told Bloomberg that they had been looking into online chat rooms that Coristine was taking part in for over a year. They said they became aware of Coristine during an investigation into an alleged hacker that the teenager was speaking to.
Another DOGE staffer, computer scientist Gavin Kliger, has been supportive of white supremacists and misogynists online, Reuters has reported. On LinkedIn, Kliger states that his job as "Special Advisor to the Director" at the Office of Personnel Management. The office has been the tip of the spear in Musk’s efforts to dismantle parts of the federal government.
The news agency and other outlets have identified about a dozen men who have been recruited to work for Musk at DOGE.
In social media comments between October last year and January, Kliger reposted posts by white supremacist Nick Fuentes and misogynist Andrew Tate. Fuentes has faced social media bans for hate speech.
Kliger responded to a post about New York Mayor Eric Adams maybe closing a migrant shelter in November, writing: “Just leave them be for a few more months. Will be much more convenient to deport them all if they are in one spot.”
Fellow DOGE staffer Marko Elez left his post on Thursday following questions from The Wall Street Journal about connections to a deleted social media account that supported racism and eugenics.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” Elez wrote in September. That same month, he urged users to “normalize Indian hate” in reference to the large number of Indian immigrants working in tech in Silicon Valley.
But on Friday, Musk announced that Elez would be “brought back.”
This came after an X post by Vice President JD Vance, who wrote that he disagrees “with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”
“He will be brought back,” said Musk. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Trump was asked about restoring Elez to his post during a press conference with the Japanese Prime Minister on Friday.
“I don’t know about the particular thing, but if the vice president said that … I’m with the vice president,” said Trump.
