The infamous teenage DOGE employee who called himself “Big Balls” has reportedly left the building.
Edward Coristine resigned on Monday, a White House official told WIRED. His government email account was deactivated as of Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times reported.
The 19-year-old was brought on in the early days of the Trump administration to work in Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a special government employee—the same designation the world’s richest man had up until his departure last month.
Coristine and several other young men with little to no government experience were hired into key roles in Musk’s chaotic cost-cutting agency, and given unprecedented access to government systems, including sensitive information impacting millions of Americans.
A person familiar with the matter confirmed Coristine’s departure to the Daily Beast. Coristine could not be reached for comment.
Coristine, along with two other Gen Z DOGE staffers, were elevated into full-time roles with top government salaries around the time of Musk’s departure at the end of May, WIRED reported at the time. He retained his previous “senior advisor” title.
He graduated from high school in New York last year. He had been enrolled as an engineering student at Northeastern University before landing his DOGE gig, and had interned for a few months at one of Musk’s companies, Neuralink, last summer.
He came to be known as “Big Balls” after adopting the nickname online, including on his LinkedIn profile. It quickly morphed into a surreal pop culture emblem of Musk’s wild government experiment, and was even coined by the billionaire himself.
“People on LinkedIn take themselves like super seriously and are pretty averse to risk, and I was like, I want to be neither of those things,” Coristine said on Fox News in May. “Honestly I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
He was involved in DOGE’s work in multiple federal agencies, and even took on roles within the State Department and Department of Homeland Security, reportedly alarming some officials.
Coristine had also been one of the leaders of Trump’s “gold card” visa project since March, according to The New York Times, and had met with officials from various agencies about the plan to sell pathways to citizenship for $5 million a pop.
News of his departure prompted reactions on social media from prominent figures, including several elected Democrats.
“He got DOGE’d,” wrote Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL). “Gone but not forgotten.”
“That must be deflating,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona posted.
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