# Edward Coristine

Edward Coristine (born December 2005), also known by the online alias "Big Balls", is an American college student and software engineer appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

## Early life and education

Coristine was born in December 2005.
According to his LinkedIn résumé, Coristine graduated from Rye Country Day School in 2024, and attends Northeastern University.
He enrolled at Northeastern University in 2024 as a mechanical engineering and physics major. His expected year of graduation is 2028. School friends describe him as intelligent and driven, with Elon Musk being his hero.
Coristine is a registered Republican.

## Career

Coristine has founded a number of startups with companies registered in Connecticut, Delaware, and the United Kingdom. One of the startups offers an artificial intelligence Discord bot for the Russian market. Coristine has a limited liability company named TESLA.SEXY.
He briefly worked for cybersecurity firm Path Network. According to internal company chat logs, Coristine was dismissed for allegedly leaking internal documents to a competitor. After his termination, a large collection of internal Path documents and conversations were leaked online. He briefly worked for LesserEvil, a snack company owned by his father Charles Coristine.
Coristine worked briefly at Neuralink before moving to the Department of Government Efficiency. Coristine is among a group of 19 to 24 year olds without prior experience in government appointed to the Department of Government Efficiency. Coristine is the youngest member of the group. He works within the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), reporting directly to Amanda Scales, a former xAI employee appointed as OPM chief of staff. OPM records list his role as an "expert". According to Wired, Coristine has sat in on calls using a non-government email address where workers were made to "go over code they had written and justify their jobs."
On February 3, 2025, Coristine held a call with federal Small Business Administration staff detailing the level of access wanted by DOGE, including human resources, contract and payment systems. He reportedly signed into the call from a non-government email address. His ability to pass a federal background check has been questioned.
On February 7, 2025, Bloomberg News reported that Coristine had been fired from his internship at cybersecurity firm Path Network in 2022 for allegedly leaking internal company information to a competitor. Following his dismissal, Coristine wrote that he had retained access to Path Network's servers, but claimed he did not exploit it. Path Network confirmed that Coristine had been fired following a security incident.
Coristine used the moniker "bigballs" on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.
On February 7, 2025, security journalist Brian Krebs reported that Coristine had previously been active in online communities known as "The Com," a network of Discord and Telegram channels associated with cybercrime activities. According to Krebs' article, The Com members have questioned Coristine's technical abilities, with one member asserting that he is "not a good dev" and he "couldn't print 'hello world' if his life depended on it."
On February 10, 2025, The Washington Post reported Coristine became a senior advisor in the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology of the United States Department of State. The Post also reported that Coristine is a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and had a position in the United States Agency for International Development.