“Big Balls” is back—or maybe never left.
Elon Musk’s notorious 19-year-old DOGE engineer has a new government job, days after he was said to have resigned, according to a new WIRED report.
Edward Coristine is set to bring his months’ worth of experience under Musk’s guidance to the Social Security Administration.
“His work will be focused on improving the functionality of the Social Security website and advancing our mission of delivering more efficient service to the American people,” an SSA spokesperson told multiple media outlets.
He joined the SSA as a special government employee, the spokesperson said. He, like his former billionaire boss, had initially worked with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under that designation until the end of May.
He was then hired into a full-time role with a top government salary, according to WIRED. Special government employees are limited to working in government for 130 days.
The circumstances around his resignation and new role in the SSA remain murky.
On Tuesday, multiple outlets reported, citing White House officials, that Coristine had resigned a day earlier.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed to the Daily Beast on Tuesday that Coristine was no longer working for DOGE or the federal government.
The White House and SSA did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday. A Trump administration official told WIRED the teen did resign on Monday, but was subsequently brought on by the SSA later in the week.
A White House official told The New York Times, however, that Coristine had only stepped down from the General Services Administration—the agency DOGE has used to coordinate much of its work—and not from the federal government entirely, attributing the earlier confusion to an internal miscommunication.
Coristine was reportedly spotted at the SSA’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland, this week with DOGE operative Aram Moghaddassi, who also works at Neuralink—the Musk-owned brain implant company where Coristine interned last summer.
Coristine, who graduated from high school last year, became an iconic figure in Musk’s chaotic cost-cutting crusade after going by “Big Balls” on social media platforms, including LinkedIn.
“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 last month. “Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would notice.”
He was involved in DOGE’s work in various federal agencies, including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The SSA was one of the many agencies where Musk and his DOGE team wreaked havoc with their heavy-handed slashes to the federal bureaucracy.
In April, SSA staffers described the situation—including office closures, website crashes and cuts to staff and services—as a “death spiral.”
Social Security is the largest government program in the U.S., distributing over $1 trillion annually to tens of millions of Americans through retirement, disability, and survivor benefits.
Musk called the program the “biggest ponzi scheme of all time” and said it was “the big one to eliminate.”
The Washington Post reported last month that key DOGE initiatives at the SSA had been rolled back after proving damaging or pointless, while overwhelmed staff now face equipment shortages, delayed payments, website crashes and a surge in retiree panic.
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