One of my and our central points of interest is the identity of these “Musk operatives” who are actually doing these things we’re hearing about throughout the federal and especially the top administrative agencies (OPM, OMB, GAO, etc.). Notably some of the best reporting on this is being done at Wired. That’s not surprising. It plays to key strengths: it’s a top flight publication, heavily plugged into the tech and Silicon Valley worlds where these guys come from, and they do the kind of granular reporting that just isn’t what the big national/DC publications generally do. This article is a key read. Who are these guys? They’re generally between 19 and 24 years of age, often college dropouts who left to go into tech and various kinds of algorithmic financial trading, in most cases interns at Thiel’s or Musk’s companies, at least one “Thiel fellow.”
In other words, hard right, techno-red-pilled bros, who now have access to things like your social security checks (whether you get them or not), your financial and, likely in some cases, medical records and at least the ability to shut down whole sections of the federal government at will by simply turning off their funding spigots. (Not good!) It sounds crazy and absurd to think that individual people could have that kind of power absent anything the law recognizes. But this is what it means when you’re this far up (or down, choose your metaphor) in the brain stem of the national government. This is what it means when you have access to the central Treasury Department payment network. You can simply turn off a spigot of funding. (I’ve now had it described to me precisely how you do it.) If you have that access, whether it’s legal or not isn’t relevant. The best analogy I can provide is that there’s some person at your bank who could just change a setting and suddenly all your checks and payments would be rejected and your funds would be frozen. Now imagine if “you” is NIH or USAID or … well, Social Security.
To be clear, we only know that this amorphous group has, according to the latest reporting, gotten this access. We don’t know who in that group is making those decisions, whether there’s any meaningful command and control. The ability to do things doesn’t mean they will be done — though Musk is saying publicly that they’ve “found” as much as $4 billion dollars of waste a day that can and will be turned off. (That’s almost $1.5 trillion, if you’re keeping track.) But given the clearly illegal nature of the actions and the players involved, that’s not terrible reassuring.
Here’s one very random detail. One of these guys mentioned in the Wired article, Luke Farritor, is someone who has come up specifically overnight in documents from my own reporting. He has been given the same kind of root-level access at HHS that we’re hearing described at Treasury.
Luke also connects, bizarrely, with a pet interest of mine, the decoding of incinerated papyrus scrolls from towns engulfed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. (Yes, we’ve jumped over a few topics here.) The area around Vesuvius was like an ancient Roman version of the Hamptons, covered with villas and estates and the extensive libraries their occupants kept. When the first treasure finders and later archeologists began digging up these ruins more than two centuries ago they found the remains of many scrolls charred beyond recognition. (They look like little bricks of char basically, or, honestly, very long, desiccated poops.) But in recent years there’s been increasing interest in the possibility that new unfurling techniques, spectroscopy, high detail x-rays, and machine learning might be able to retrieve the contents of those scrolls.
Pretty cool, right?
Here’s why that’s quite exciting beyond the technology involved. We only have access to a tiny fraction of the writing and scientific knowledge that existed in the libraries of the ancient world. What we have is almost entirely what made it through the vagaries of about a thousand years of culling and preservation in the monasteries of Western Europe (what the monks thought was important) and separate channels of preservation out from Constantinople (Istanbul), the monasteries of the east and especially scientific texts from the Muslim Arab world. The vast majority is lost. Those Vesuvius-adjacent papyri hold out the possibility of retrieving lost texts from the past. (The one check on expectations you should have is that what was preserved wasn’t just a random sample. Those monks saved what seemed most important. So it’s not random that we ended up with Aristotle and Aeschylus. That said, there’s a lot those monks didn’t care about or found abhorrent that never made the cut.)
That led to something called the Vesuvius Challenge, a set of cash prizes for the first people who could accurately decode small portions of text from one of these scrolls. Basically, using cash prizes to jumpstart tech strategies to decode these things. The prize committee commissioned a series of extremely detailed 3D scans of the scrolls and then anyone could access them and use machine learning strategies to retrieve the infinitely fragmentary traces of ink and decode them. And here’s the thing. In February 2024, Luke was one of a team of three young men — Youssef Nader, Farritor and Julian Schilliger — who won the grand prize of $700,000 for decoding a portion of what turned out to be an unknown work of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. You can read the details here.
In any case, Luke Farritor was one of the three-person team. So Luke is no fool — at least not in terms of brain power. He’s a former SpaceX intern and he dropped out of college to become a Thiel Fellow, a fellowship which pays super smart kids to drop out of college (no, really.) And now, at what I think is age 24, he appears to have root-level access to all records and payments through the Department of Health and Human Services.
Have a great day.
NOTE: As I have for 25 years, I welcome your responses, which you can send to talk (at) talkingpointsmemo dot com. If you’re a government worker or anyone else who has sensitive or confidential information to share about what’s happening inside the federal government you can reach me via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com or via Signal at joshtpm dot 99. Please only use these encrypted channels for confidential communication.
