‘Big Balls’ No Longer Works for the US Government

Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the first technologists hired as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is no longer working for the federal government, according to multiple sources.

“Edward Coristine resigned yesterday,” a White House official tells WIRED.

Coristine received full-time employment status at the GSA late last month, as reported by WIRED. As of Tuesday afternoon, his Google Workspace account with the General Services Administration (GSA) was no longer active, according to a source with direct knowledge. His name also no longer appears on a White House contact list of current DOGE employees on the federal payroll maintained by a senior administration official, the official says.

In May, Coristine appeared to be attending regular meetings with departments and agencies, including a May 5 meeting with the Commerce Department to discuss Trump’s golden Visa, a May 15 meeting to discuss implementing the DOGE agenda at the military, and a May 22 meeting with the Treasury Department. He was listed on a report regarding the GSA workforce on June 10. That report comes out once a month.

Previously, Coristine was one of a handful of DOGE-affiliated staffers who were occasionally seen at GSA headquarters in Washington, DC. He worked from the sixth floor of the office, which was cordoned off for employees affiliated with DOGE and the agency’s leadership team.

The GSA and Coristine did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.

When Musk exited government in an official capacity last month, DOGE’s future was uncertain. Musk’s top lieutenant, Steve Davis, president of the Boring Company, another Musk venture, also announced he would leave DOGE with Musk.

Sahil Lavingia, a former DOGE member who WIRED first identified at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs says, “I have heard since Elon and Steve have supposedly departed, they’ve terminated a lot of those that got hired. They’re all still probationary, right? There’s that two-year probationary period. So there’s a good chance that a lot of those people end up getting fired anyway.”

Coristine, according to Lavingia, was one of a small group of technologists who were highly trusted within DOGE and deployed across multiple federal agencies, and given multiple federal laptops. “The core group of pre-inauguration engineers joked about how many laptops they had. It was almost like a competition in the sense to have seven, eight different laptops that they would run around with,” says Lavingia.

During his time in government—a period in which DOGE sought to dismantle large parts of the federal bureaucracy, obtained direct access to sensitive federal payment systems, and worked to join siloed systems together to enable surveillance of people in the US—Coristine appeared at the GSA, Office of Personnel Management, the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and the Small Business Administration.

Coristine, who has gone by the handle “Big Balls” online, is a 19-year-old high school graduate who worked at Neuralink for several months and founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC in 2021. The company owns several domains including two registered in Russia, one of which is an AI Discord bot. He also briefly worked for a company founded by reformed blackhat hackers called the Path Network, and a Telegram handle associated with Coristine appears to have solicited a distributed denial of service attack.