Connie Francis sang Where the Boys Are.
Today I will tell you who the boys are.
Chance Townsend if Mashable mocked the crew of software engineers who are combing through the records of the $6,000,000,000,000—$6 trillion—the federal government spent last year. He asked, who are these little boys? And why are they in charge of our money?
Actually, Elon Musk said they have read-only access to the payment records.
Musk put them in charge of reading the payments because Congress and a string of presidents put the nation on the brink of bankruptcy. We are $36 trillion in debt and on our way in a handbasket to $50 trillion by the end of Trump’s second term. Trump wants to slow the spending.
Who they are is very interesting, as Arte Johnson would say.
I’ll start with Luke Farritor and the Herculaneum papyri, which are a bunch of scrolls found in 1756 in the village of Herculaneum which was destroyed along with Pompei when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The scrolls were too frail to unfurl without destroying them. For 265 years protectors kept but never opened the scrolls.
Along came Farritor, a college student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who figured out how to read them digitally. While other kids are using AI to undress their fellow students and celebrities, this little boy used AI to unveil documents, which went unread for 1,956 years.
He and his team won the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge to read the scrolls. He was all of 21. These are the scrolls.
That was two years ago. After interning with Space X, he earned a Thiel Fellow award of $100,000. He dropped out of college and went to work on cutting government waste.
Next is Akash Bobba. The Economic Times reported:
Before landing in DOGE, Bobba built an impressive resume that spanned multiple Silicon Valley powerhouses. He attended UC Berkeley’s prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (MET) program, a highly selective initiative designed to nurture future tech industry leaders.
Bobba worked as an intern at Meta, Palantir, and the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, gaining experience in AI, data analytics, and financial modeling. But what truly set him apart was his problem-solving ability and resilience under pressure.
A viral anecdote from his time at Berkeley highlights his genius-level coding skills. A former classmate, Charis Zhang, recalled a remarkable incident where Bobba essentially rewrote an entire project from scratch overnight after a teammate accidentally deleted it just two days before a deadline.
Next up is Edward Coristine, 19, who worked at Musk’s Neuralink company which is working to use brain chips to help the paralyzed walk again.
Before that, he was a system engineer at Path Network, which “Arising out of necessity and utility, the innovation at the core of Path began first as an answer to the question of the possibility of truly granular network intelligence. This innovation, a distributed network monitoring platform, was a necessary one, as Founder and CTO Marshal Webb can attest. Frustrated due to the lack of granular & insightful network intelligence services and curious of the promise of novel approaches to this central problem, Mr. Webb began work on the foundation of the platform with a number of close friends. This foundational phase would indeed prove to be quite fruitful, with new concepts such as incentivized network and geographic diversity being melded into the framework of the platform.”
And on and on. I have no idea what any of this says but I know what it means: at 19 this guy is good enough for Musk. That’s good enough for me.
Please note that these three babies are linked to companies founded by the guys who built PayPal, and sold it. After PayPal they did things like start car companies. I trust people who made billions off high tech over GS employees when it comes to computers.
Next up is Ethan Shaotran. He founded Energize AI, which received a $100,000 grant from Open AI. His team was one of 10 recipients out of a field of 1,000 applicants.
I have no idea what it does, but Open AI said it is “developing guidelines for aligning AI models with live, large-scale participation and a ‘community notes’ algorithm.”
Gavin Kliger is a Senior Software Engineer at Databricks since May 2020, with a strong background in software engineering and research. Kliger served as a Featured Speaker at KubeCon Europe in April 2023, presenting work on Kubernetes controllers to an audience of 240 engineers. Prior experience includes research at Berkeley NetSys Lab, focusing on maintaining invariants in cloud-based microservice deployments, and a role as a Software Engineer at Twitter, where Kliger led a project to virtualize Mac build infrastructure. Kliger was also an Accel Scholar at Berkeley and has taught programming and robotics to public school students. Kliger holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
I think this Gavin knows what he is doing, as opposed to that other one who is literally burning California down.
Next there is Gauthier Cole Killian, who is a volunteer.
He works at Jump Trading: “We empower exceptional talents in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science to seek scientific boundaries, push through them, and apply cutting-edge research to global financial markets.”
And just like the original astronauts, there are 7 DOGE young-uns.
Times Now World reported, “Marko Elez is 25 years old. He graduated from Rutgers University and worked as an engineer for X and SpaceX. According to WIRED, Elez has direct access to Treasury Department systems that disperse almost all federal government payments. In 2023, the system paid 87.9% of all federal payments. Elez has also been given administrator-level privileges that could allow him to change user permissions and delete and modify critical files that contain sensitive and confidential information.”
So he’s doing what some unelected GS administrator did before. The difference is he is doing it for the people, the bureaucrat did it for the Democrats and a fat pension.
The Democrat Party’s talking points begin with saying they are too young. Were the 17-year-olds who helped storm the beaches at Normandy too young? How old was Steve Jobs when he founded Apple? How old was Bill Gates when he founded Microsoft to steal Apple’s work?
Another talking point is they are too young to make decisions on government decisions. They won’t be making those decisions. Musk won’t either. Donald Trump, 78, will ultimately decide. All they are doing is providing him the data he needs and that is what Democrats fear.
The final talking point is who elected them?
Well, who elected David A. Lebryk, the lifer at Treasury who refused to give them and thus the president access to records on where the money goes? He resigned/retired ahead of being fired.
Musk has done the near impossible. He found the only youths in America that the Party of the Pedophiles hate.
Cheeseburger Griller Chuck Schumer told Congress, “Leader Jeffries and I will join together to push legislation to prevent unlawful meddling in the Treasury department’s payment systems, to prevent everyone's records from being made available to a small group of people who can look at them at will.”
Meddling!
The government is corrupt and would have continued to bilk the public if not for those meddling software engineers.
Uncle Sam’s spending is so fat, he needs a liposuction only a Elon Musk and a bunch of little boys can deliver.
Two weeks into the project, the babies are making Democrats cry. This is how you get Democrats to quit crying: throw cheese at them. It works.
Who are these little boys? Right now they are the most important software engineers in the world and some of them are even old enough to drink.
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Ed Martin is DC’s U.S attorney. Good luck with today’s two polls.
The shrieking from the Marxist/Democrat/Hate America Party’s apparatchiks makes my schadenfreude runneth over. How incredibly wonderful is it that these young geniuses working for an older genius who in tern is working for an even older genius are working to save this country from economic ruin?
Thanks, Don, I was wondering about these little geniuses encamped with Musk that have the DC establishment’s undies in a twist. The howling at the front door of USAID and AOC actually saying Musk is stupid😂 means we’re over the target. The people are finally going to get a look at how much we’re spending and on what, and the fund tracking at USAID will show us the convoluted trail our taxes leave on their journey into the offshore bank accounts of our corrupt politicians. All the rending of garments and Schumer screaming and immigrant riots won’t help them now. Musk did the best first chess move by locking them out of their computers, then locking the front doors.