Musk Connections: Intern at SpaceX; Intern at Starlink
Other Corporate Affiliations: Thiel Fellow
DOGE Deployment: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; State Department; USAID; General Services Administration; Education Department; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Energy Department
- Farritor’s official title within the Trump administration is unclear. He has been deployed to a number of agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped to illegally gut the agency. On February 7, the New York Times reported that Farritor already had “email accounts at the General Services Administration, the Education Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, [and] was at the Energy Department on Wednesday.” He has also reportedly been deployed to the State Department to help with the illegal dismantling of USAID.
- Within the Energy Department, Farritor was reportedly given access to IT systems over objection from the department’s general counsel, who raised concerns that Farritor had not undergone a proper background investigation.
- For DOGE, Farritor is reportedly learning COBOL, an arcane programming language used in many government and banking systems. Contrasting with this obviously grandiose endeavor, on December 10, Farritor tweeted, “Are there LLMs made specifically for parsing things like documents/forms/PDFs/json/html/excel/etc and converting them from one format to another?”
FARRITOR IS A THIEL FELLOW AND APPEARS TO CURRENTLY BE RECEIVING MONEY FROM PETER THIEL—A FAR-RIGHT IDEOLOGUE WITH VAST INTERESTS IN THE GOVERNMENT
- The Thiel Fellowship is a $100,000, two-year fellowship available to people under the age of 22 willing to drop out of school to pursue a startup. Farritor is a 2024 Thiel Fellow. Since the grant is “spread out over two years,” Farritor is presumably still receiving money from the fellowship—essentially directly from Peter Thiel.
- No public communications from Farritor, Thiel, or the government have indicated that Farritor has relinquished or will relinquish the Thiel Fellowship to avoid conflicts of interest.
- Thiel’s business interests in government are vast. Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir and backs Anduril, both of which are major military contractors. In December, both companies were looking to form a consortium of tech groups to bid jointly on defense contracts. Musk’s SpaceX, Farritor’s former employer, was among the companies in talks to join the consortium. On February 11, Anduril took over a $22 billion contract with the Department of Defense.
- Thiel is a far-right ideologue. In one 2009 essay, he wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” More recently, Thiel has been a big booster of the far-right figure Curtis Yarvin, who wrote at the end of last year that “everything rots when it has no owner—human beings included.” Yarvin has long advocated for a plan he calls “RAGE,” which stands for “Retire All Government Employees.”
As Elon Musk’s DOGE continues to tear through agencies with little oversight or transparency, the Revolving Door Project is publishing profiles of reported DOGE employees: who they are, where they came from, and any conflicts of interest that might make their unfettered access to the federal government dangerous to the public. Read them all here.