Elon Musk is an “idol” to the 19-year-old popcorn fortune heir who dropped out of college to work for the tech billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to an unnamed friend.
Edward Coristine was a freshman engineering major at Northeastern University before he left to sign onto Musk’s team of baby-faced programmers, who have been given unprecedented access to sensitive government records since Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“He just thinks Elon [Musk] is a genius entrepreneur and admired his work and wanted to follow his tracks somewhat in the entrepreneurial space,” a source close to Coristine told The Huntington News (Northeastern’s student paper). They confirmed that Musk was the teenager’s “idol.”
A friend also told the paper that Coristine came across as politically “independent,” but didn’t often discuss politics.
Instead, Coristine kept his focus on engineering and entrepreneurship, impressing his peers in the process.
“He’s very passionate about what he does,” the friend told the Huntington. “Obviously, he’s super passionate about computer science, and he’s trying to chase that passion. He’s very skillful at it because he’s obviously very accomplished for someone his age, just a freshman in college. He’s already done so much.”
“Through high school, his goal was never really to go to college,” the source said. “He really just wanted to build his own thing, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.”
Coristine’s friends from college had no idea that he had dropped out to work for Musk until Wired reported as much this week, according to the Huntington.
“I saw him here at Northeastern as I was moving in,” one friend said. “He was telling me he was moving out and just didn’t elaborate.”
They added that Coristine suggested he was planning to work for his father, Charles Coristine, who is the CEO of the health snack company LesserEvil.
Little is known about Coristine’s work for DOGE, the government agency that Trump invented for Musk to lead. Wired reported that personnel records list his him as an “expert,” adding that he “has appeared on calls where workers were made to go over code they had written and justify their jobs.”
The actions of Musk and his team have sparked outcry from Democrats, who say that the unelected Trump loyalist, who owns X and Tesla, is staging a bureaucratic takeover of the federal government.
DOGE’s purported goal is to cut government spending, although Musk claimed on Tuesday that the group is in the process of “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.”
