Latest news with #BigBalls'
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Yahoo
Elon Musk's DOGE Staffer 'Big Balls' Was Involved in Cybercrime Ring
The teenage DOGE employee who went by the online username 'Big Balls' used to run a company that provided tech support to a cybercrime group, according to Reuters. In 2022, Edward Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services. One of its users was a group of cybercriminals known as EGodly, who openly bragged about stealing phone numbers and cryptocurrency, hacking law enforcement emails in South America and Eastern Europe, cyberstalking an FBI agent in Delaware, and trafficking other stolen data. The group, now retired, even thanked Coristine's company for its support in 2023. 'We extend our gratitude to our valued partners DiamondCDN for generously providing us with their amazing DDoS protection and caching systems, which allow us to securely host and safeguard our website,' the group said. Coristine did not reply to Reuters's request for comment. It should be alarming that a teen who used to work with a cybercrime group now has wide access to the inner workings of the federal government and the personal information of millions of Americans. Elon Musk, who has expressed support for Big Balls in the past, has yet to comment.
South China Morning Post
27-02-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Who is young Elon Musk hire Edward Coristine, aka Big Balls? The Doge staffer and new ‘senior adviser' at the State Department is just 19 and registered his first venture, Tesla.Sexy LLC, at 16
A 19-year-old high school graduate and Doge staffer who goes by the nickname 'Big Balls' has now been given a 'senior adviser' role at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, according to The Washington Post. The teenager, who has been identified as Edward Coristine, has drawn backlash and raised further concern about Elon Musk , who has been leading President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). He appears to have since launched an account on X, where he shared the news publicly. 'Honoured to announce I've secured a role at the State Department. Huge thanks to the media for the coverage and to my friends who've supported me along the way. Big things ahead. #BigBalls,' he wrote. Advertisement Edward Coristine dropped out of Northeastern University to work in Silicon Valley. Photo: @EdwardCoristine/X Here's what we know about the controversial young adult who's joining Musk's team. Who are Edward Coristine's parents? Edward Coristine's father Charles Coristine is reportedly also a controversial figure. He is a former Morgan Stanley employee who bought the failing organic popcorn company Lesser Evil for US$250,000 and grew it into a multimillion-dollar brand, per CNBC. He was later accused of false advertising by stating that the snacks were healthier than other options on the market, according to The Independent. Edward has been dubbed a 'popcorn heir' thanks to his father's dealings. Where did Edward Coristine go to college? Edward Coristine is an aspiring entrepreneur. Photo: Reddit
WIRED
27-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The DOGE Takeover Is Worse Than You Think
Feb 27, 2025 10:08 AM What's happening to the US government right now is bad. What comes next is worse. Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images If you've felt overwhelmed by all the DOGE news, you're not alone. You'd need too much cork board and yarn to keep track of which agencies it has occupied by now, much less what it's doing there. Here's a simple rubric, though, to help contextualize the DOGE updates you do have time and energy to process: It's worse than you think. DOGE is hard to keep track of. This is by design; the only information about the group outside of its own mistake-ridden ledger of 'savings' comes from media reports. So much for being 'maximally transparent,' as Elon Musk has promised. The blurriness is also partly a function of the speed and breadth with which DOGE has operated. Keeping track of the destruction is like counting individual bricks scattered around a demolition site. You may be aware, for instance, that a 19-year-old who goes by 'Big Balls' online plays some role in all this. Seems bad. But you may have missed that Edward Coristine has since been installed at the nation's top cybersecurity agency. And the State Department and the Small Business Administration, and he has a Department of Homeland Security email address, and by the way also had a recent side gig selling AI Discord bots to Russians. See? Worse than you think. Even if that feels like old news, remember that it's actually still happening, every day a fresh incursion by Big Balls and his cohort of 20-something technologists. (In fairness, they're not all young; some of them are old enough to present conflicts of interest so flagrant that they literally lack modern precedent.) Similarly, you've likely heard that the United States Agency for International Development has been gutted and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been put on ice. All true, all bad. But here's what that means in practice: Fewer people globally have access to vaccines than they did a month ago. More babies are being born with HIV/AIDS. From here on out, anyone who gets ripped off by payday loan companies—or, say, social media platforms moonlighting as payments services—has lost their most capable defender. Keep going. The thousands of so-called probationary employees DOGE has fired included a significant number of experienced workers who just got promoted or transferred. National Science Foundation staffing cuts and proposed National Institutes of Health grant limits will combine to kneecap scientific research in the United States for a generation. Terminations at the US Department of Agriculture have sent programs designed to help farmers into disarray. On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration cancelled a meeting that would have given guidance on this year's flu vaccine composition. It hasn't been rescheduled. Don't care about science or vaccines? The Social Security Administration is reportedly going to cut its staff in half. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is going to be cut by as much as 84 percent. Hundreds of workers who keep the power grid humming in the Pacific Northwest were fired before a scramble to rehire a few of them. The National Parks Service, the Internal Revenue Service, all hit hard. So don't make any long-term bets on getting your checks on time, keeping your lights on, buying a home for the first time, or enjoying Yosemite. Don't assume all the things that work now will still work tomorrow. Speaking of which, let's not forget that DOGE has fired people working to prevent bird flu and to safeguard the US nuclear arsenal. (The problem with throwing a chainsaw around is that you don't make clean cuts.) The agencies in question have reportedly tried to hire those workers back. Fine. But even if they're able to, the long-term question that hasn't been answered yet is: Who would stay? Who would work under a regime so cocksure and incompetent that it would mistakenly fire the only handful of people who actually know how to take care of the nukes? According to a recent report from The Bulwark, that brain drain is already underway. And this is all before the real reductions-in-force begin, mass purges of civil servants that will soon be conducted, it seems, with an assist from DOGE-modified, automated software. The US government is about to lose decades of institutional knowledge across who knows how many agencies, including specialists that aren't readily replaced by loyalists. Elon Musk has, at least, acknowledged that DOGE will make mistakes, and promised fast fixes. He even called one out specifically Wednesday, the cancelation of a USAID program designed to prevent the spread of Ebola. 'We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,' he said during an appearance at Trump's first cabinet meeting. 'And there was no interruption.' This is not the case, as The Washington Post first reported. Not only has Ebola prevention not been restored—it was and remains severely diminished—but the Trump administration also said Wednesday it would terminate nearly 10,000 contracts and grants from USAID and the State Department. Many of those contracts represent an attempt to lessen some form of suffering in some part of the world. It's too many individual stories to tell, too many tragedies unfolding too far away. It's worse than you think in the same way that your brain breaks a little when you try to picture how deep the ocean is. It's worse than you think because by the time the courts catch up, the damage will already have been done. It's worse than you think because the people running the government seem to have no higher mission than to watch it burn. Federal agencies could absolutely be more efficient, but we're long past the point where efficiency is a plausible goal. DOGE's cuts have no apparent regard for civil society or opportunity costs or long-term strategic thinking. Their targets are Elon Musk's and Project 2025's targets. They have found no fraud, just democracy at work. They're apparently eager to see what happens when it no longer does. It's worse than you think because so far all DOGE has done is drop a boulder into the middle of a pond. If you think this is bad, wait for the ripples. The Chatroom What will be the most lasting impact of the DOGE cuts? Leave a comment on the site or send your thoughts to mail@ WIRED Reads Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading 🔗 DOGE Quietly Deletes the 5 Biggest Spending Cuts It Celebrated Last Week: The parade of casual incompetence continues. (The New York Times) 🔗 Trump Administration to Cut 92% of USAID Foreign Aid Contracts: This is reportedly going to 'save' $60 billion. The federal budget is $6.8 trillion. As discussed above, the true cost will be incalculable. (Axios) 🔗 Is What DOGE Is Doing Legal?: Great question! Wish the courts would get around to answering it! (The Washington Post) The Download Check out this week's special-edition podcast episode, WIRED News Update: DOGE's Many Conflicts of Interest & Elon's Weekend Email Chaos. I joined global editorial director Katie Drummond to dig into all things DOGE. Listen now. Thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with Makena via email, Instagram, X, Bluesky, and Signal at makenakelly.32.
WIRED
13-02-2025
- Business
- WIRED
DOGE's Race to the Bottom
Feb 13, 2025 12:11 PM Elon Musk's takeover of US government agencies has happened at remarkable speeds. That's the point. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:The thing about the takeover of key US government institutions by the world's richest man and his strike force of former interns is that it's happening so fast. It's been three weeks since Elon Musk's agents took over the government's IT and HR departments. Since then, the movements of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have had the cartography of a horror movie, DOGE picking off agencies one by one based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and data. Every day brings fresh incursions. Three weeks ago the United States believed in humanitarian aid. It helped people who had been ripped off by big corporations. It funded the infrastructure necessary to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Agency for International Development is gutted, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice, and National Institutes of Health grants are handcuffed. So much for all that. These are spreadsheet cruelties, executed with a click. The loss of real peoples' jobs and lives—yes, despite what X-famous conspiracy theorists will tell you, USAID saved lives—all immaterial compared to the pursuit of a tighter balance sheet. Three weeks ago, a 19-year-old who calls himself 'Big Balls' online didn't have access to government personnel records and more. A 25-year-old with a closet full of racist tweets hadn't gotten the keys to Treasury systems that pay out $5.45 trillion each year. Elon Musk hadn't turned the Oval Office into a romper room for his 4-year-old son. The speed is strategy, of course, flooding the zone so that neither the media nor the courts can keep pace. Lawsuits and court orders move on a different timescale than this slash-and-burn approach. (At this pace, DOGE will have tapped into every last government server long before the Supreme Court even has a chance to weigh in.) But it's also reflexive. The first order of business in a corporate takeover is to slash costs as quickly as possible. If you can't fire people, offer them buyouts. If they won't take the buyouts, find a way to fire them anyway. Keep cutting until you hit bone. This is how you get an executive order declaring that 'each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,' an arbitrary ratio with no regard for actual staffing needs. It's how you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block no matter how fully occupied they are. It's both extreme and ill-considered, a race to empty the town's only well. And then … what? This is the question that Elon Musk and DOGE have failed to answer, because there is no answer. Does the United States government need to become a profit engine? To return shareholder value? Does Medicaid need to demonstrate a product-market fit in time for the next funding round? This is consultant logic. This is an engineering sprint whose inevitable finish line is the unwinding of the social contract. Democracy doesn't die in darkness after all; it dies in JIRA tickets filed by Palantir alums. It's somehow even worse than that, though. Suppose you take this whole enterprise at face value, that the United States should go through the private equity ringer. It does not take a Stanford MBA to know that cutting expenses only helps half of your profit and loss statement. Any serious attempt to treat the US like a business would involve increasing revenues. So where are the taxes? And why demolish the CFPB, which has paid out over $20 billion to US citizens—shareholders, if you will—through its enforcement actions? In the coming weeks and months, as this farce continues to unfurl, remember that the goal of most acquisitions is not to benefit the acquired. It is to either subsume or discard, whichever generates the highest return. Elon Musk's unprecedented influence over the executive branch will ultimately benefit Elon Musk. The employees in charge are his employees. The data DOGE collects, the procurement contracts they oversee, it all flows up to him. And it's flowing too quickly to keep up with, much less to stop. The Chatroom Do you think Elon Musk will be able to avoid conflicts of interest in his DOGE role? Leave a comment on the site or send your thoughts to mail@ WIRED Reads Want more? Subscribe now for unlimited access to WIRED. What Else We're Reading 🔗 Elon Musk's Financial Disclosure Will Not Be Made Public: Because why would anybody need to see a thing like that at a time like this? (The New York Times) 🔗 AI Slop of Musk and Trump on TikTok Racks Up 700 Million Views: It's not just Meta. TikTok is also suffering from an AI slop problem, particularly around political content. (404 Media) 🔗 How Elon Musk and His DOGE Goons Are Following the Private Equity Playbook: Anna Merlan smartly views DOGE through a private equity lens. (Mother Jones) The Download If all the DOGE news is getting too hard to keep track of, check out yesterday's special edition podcast episode, WIRED News Update: Keeping Tabs on DOGE. WIRED politics senior editor Leah Feiger joins global editorial director Katie Drummond to dig into all things Elon. Listen now. Thanks again for subscribing. You can get in touch with Makena via email, Instagram, X, Bluesky, and Signal at makenakelly.32.
