Tears, Spaceships and Nostalgia: How Backstreet Boys 'Pushed the Limits' of Las Vegas' Sphere With 'Mind-Boggling' Residency Launch
McLean wasn't the only band member overcome with emotion during Friday's nostalgic, otherworldly trip down memory lane. Kevin Richardson became so choked up he couldn't sing his verse of 'The Perfect Fan,' while Brian Littrell cried next.
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Nick Carter was meanwhile fighting tears before he even rose onstage for 1999's anthem 'Larger Than Life,' which had audience members seemingly dancing through space while dodging meteorites thanks to Sphere's immersive visuals.
'As I was about to come up, I started breaking down and crying because it was so emotional and surreal,' Carter told THR in an exclusive interview. 'We've been together so long and had so many ups and downs, so the fact we can still perform on any stage is amazing.
'We'd been rehearsing for two months and we're perfectionists, so we've been hard on ourselves, and finally getting to that place where you're about to be launched out of a lift onstage was very emotional.'
It's not surprising emotions were running high. For Carter, Richardson, McLean, Littrell and Howie Dorough, 1999's Millennium record catapulted them to startling fame and cemented the foundations of a 32-year career that has seen them tour the world, release 10 albums, earn Grammy nominations, release a documentary and build solo careers.
Meanwhile for fans, Millennium ignited their first musical infatuation or concert experience – or the tour they forever regretted missing.
I was 17 in New Zealand when I helped launch a petition to bring the Into the Millennium Tour Down Under. Two decades later, I was mesmerized as the heartthrobs soared high above the stage on their DNA World Tour, sparking flashbacks to when they rode hoverboards through the air during Into the Millennium. 'This is it,' I thought. 'This is the closest I'll ever get to seeing Into the Millennium.'
Then came Millennium 2.0.
An idea hatched eight years ago, Carter says the band hoped to transport fans back to simpler times.
'There was no social media and technology wasn't as advanced,' says Carter. 'People had to go to concerts to watch shows and we had to deliver. The Millennium tour was progressive. We were taking risks and facing the challenges of doing a production in-the-round and flying on surfboards.
'There were times we'd get stuck in the audience and things would break down because technology wasn't what it is now. It was a simpler, great time and we're bringing that back, so people can relive great music and feel like kids again.'
Yet, the residency was never about re-creating the 123-stop tour.
'We didn't want to redo Millennium,' show producer and director Baz Halpin told THR. 'Sphere's a unique venue and with Backstreet being the first pop show, we didn't want to repeat the Millennium tour, but take elements and blend them in. It's like, 'What would a BSB Into the Millennium Tour be if it was done for the first time in 2025?''
'We wanted to build a story around Millennium — give it a character, then let world-building from song-to-song transpire from that,' Halpin continued. 'We've built a galaxy which incorporates things people will recognize, but it's Spherified.'
One of those familiar elements is the spaceship setting from 'Larger Than Life.' Another Millennium dance anthem, 'It's Gotta Be You,' followed the opener, before the quintet veered off Millennium to 1997's 'As Long as You Love Me,' by which point Sphere was a dancing sea of white, thanks to McLean requesting concertgoers don white like the album cover.
Many had planned those outfits for months, a reflection of how journeying into the millennium kicked off well before opening night for many fans. For me, it started at LAX, where 'As Long as You Love Me' played in the departure lounge, before I landed in Vegas to hear 'Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)' blasting through the terminal.Entering The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, Millennium shirts dotted the casino floor, while Liam's Den & Bubble Bar offered a 'Millennium Cocktail.' A jaw-dropping, edible chocolate, light-up Sphere greeted me in my room, before I headed to the 'Backstreet Boys Terminal' to hop on-board 'Air BSB.'The immersive, free two-story fan experience was co-curated by BSB and Vibee, a company founded by Live Nation that offers global destination experiences. Vibee package holders enter via a specially designed Air BSB check-in area, while regular 'passengers' are greeted by a departures board listing stops from the original tour.
Saluting the group's iconic 'I Want It That Way' video (filmed at LAX,) the airport theme's dripping with '90s nostalgia, like a replica of MTV's Total Request Live set with cardboard cutouts of BSB and host Carson Daly. Fans can also stop by the BSB Mail Centre to post fan mail or see memorabilia including MTV VMA awards, handwritten set lists and costuming.
Stopping by on Thursday, BSB were said to be so excited by the experience they offered up more memorabilia, before eagerly recording and broadcasting boarding announcements.
From here, the walkway from The Venetian to Sphere feels like an airport air bridge (complete with a mass, post-show 'I Want It That Way' singalong).
Along with such hits, the band delivered favorites like 'Don't Want You Back,' and 'Get Another Boyfriend,' accompanied with slick dance moves care of longtime choreographers Rich and Tone Talauega. Heart-wrenching 'Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely,' meanwhile, was backdropped by smoky spirits performing interpretative dances.
The set list was the first and most 'critical' step, according to Dublin native Halpin, who carved out his career working with boy bands like Westlife, Boyzone and Blue. He's since worked on The Eagles' Sphere residency, UFC Noche and Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.
Halpin recalls hearing about the 'iconic' Into the Millennium tour, but never imagined he'd one day get a call from BSB manager Ron Laffitte about creating a Sphere version. He's grateful the group quickly comprehended the 'gravitas' of every creative decision.
'You can't reverse when you're creating in Sphere because it's so technologically complicated,' Halpin said. 'With every layer, you're building on the foundation and it's got to be absolutely right, so the next layer's solid. If you pull a toothpick from the bottom, the whole thing topples.'
'The band caught on that we had to nail down songs and not deviate six months out otherwise all the work would fall apart. There's no time to redo things like a normal tour. You can't make another piece of content in three days — it takes three months.'
While the hits were a must, it was a medley of lesser-performed ballads that had fans hypnotized, like 'Back to Your Heart,' 'No One Else Comes Close to You' and 'Spanish Eyes'. 'This is my mom's favorite song,' Dorough shared. 'She's here and 91!'
Moms were also the theme of 'The Perfect Fan,' with photos of the band's wives, kids and moms flashing across screens. 'This song's super-special to me,' Littrell explained. 'I wrote it many moons ago and dedicate it to my mother.'
Fans were in tears as the group crooned haunting 2005 ballad'Siberia,' while screens showered virtual snow and displayed aged versions of BSB in a Mt. Rushmore-style visual.
They also performed 2025 single, 'Hey,' which features on newly-released Millennium 2.0, alongside remastered versions of the original tracks, live recordings and B-sides like 'If You Knew What I Knew.'
Of course, it was the final act everyone was waiting for — airborne BSB. The 'BSB Army' had long wondered if the hoverboards from the original tour would appear, with Dorough teasing an 'adaptation' of such moves to THR in May. The singers instead rose on a spacecraft-style platform during 'I Want It That Way.'
For Carter, it was the coolest moment of the production. 'We're raised into the air suspended with four cables,' says the musician, who has released solo album Love Life Tragedy alongside preparing for Sphere and will drop new single 'Searchlight' on Thursday. 'It's secure, but also a little dangerous and just mind-boggling.'
Following debate over the best seats for the show, the 200s sections proved optimal for taking in 360-degree effects, while feeling eye-to-eye with BSB as they floated above the stage. However, general admission took visuals to another level as I frequently questioned if the ground or stage was moving while feeling sucked up into the screen.
'I'm going to need chiro after this,' one fan remarked, craning her neck. Other GA attendees wore compression socks, stretched mid-show and briefly left to pump breast milk — somewhat answering Halpin's question of what an Into the Millennium Tour looks like in 2025.
GA was also where the party was at as 'Everybody (Backstreet's Back)' closed the show with robots performing the video's iconic choreography onscreen.
By the time show two wrapped on Saturday, the quintet was in celebratory mode at The Venetian's Voltaire, where Richardson, 53, led a singalong to Fugees hit 'Killing Me Softly.' It's rare the whole band attend afterparties, but it reflected the solid team effort behind Sphere.
Halpin stressed how each member's input was imperative. 'It's like Inside Out, where they're all different emotions and bring a unique character. Kevin questions everything. He needs to understand every detail to build the whole picture. Brian's asking, 'How is this decision impacting everything else we're going to do?' AJ's all about, 'How do we keep the crowd's energy up?''
'Howie wants to understand the emotion behind everything. Nick's the canary in the coal mine. When we did tests, he was the one I'd look to to gauge reaction. You look to Nick to see how an audience member's going to experience it.
'When you combine all those perspectives, it becomes cohesive and very Backstreet Boys. They know who they are and what their fans like. But they're also risk-takers, who want to push boundaries.'
In doing so, Halpin believes Into the Millennium's a game-changer for Sphere.
'We're pushing the limits of what's been done at Sphere because we came in with the experience of other shows,' he says. 'Sphere was a newborn with U2, and with every artist that's gone in since, it's had another birthday and grown. Every band before has been a soundtrack to the visuals, but this show's different. It's the most ambitious show that's been done in there.'
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Android Authority
16 minutes ago
- Android Authority
My favorite Google Pixel features that don't get enough love
Google Pixel phones are packed with intelligent and helpful features. While Google ensures many of these are front and center by promoting them when you first set up the phone or by periodically reminding you about them when you perform certain tasks, a surprising number of equally brilliant features fly under the radar. These hidden gems can significantly improve your daily experience with your phone. It's a shame that a ton of users simply don't know about them. With that in mind, this is a list of some of my favorite Pixel-exclusive features that, for whatever reason, don't seem to get the attention they deserve. You might be a power user who knows about all of these, but it's likely there will be at least a few readers who will walk away learning something new about the small computer in their pocket. Now Playing has a semi-hidden history Ryan Haines / Android Authority Most Pixel owners are familiar with Now Playing, considering it is one of the features Pixel UI asks you about when you first set up a Pixel. Now Playing identifies songs playing in your environment without you needing to do a thing to trigger it — the information appears on your lock screen automatically. Think of it as an always-on Shazam. What Google doesn't make immediately obvious, however, is that your phone keeps a running list of every song it ever identifies. Now Playing lets you see the music playing around you, but there's a running list of all the songs your phone has ever logged, too. This history can be incredibly handy, but accessing it is a bit convoluted. You can tap the music note on your lock screen when a song is actively playing, but that's not much help when you're trying to recall a track from last night's party while sitting on your couch slightly hungover. To find your full song history, you need to navigate to Settings > Display & touch > Lock screen > Now Playing, and then tap on Now Playing History. Thankfully, you only need to do this once. From the history screen, tap the three-dot menu icon in the top right and select Add to Home Screen. This creates a shortcut icon on your home screen, giving you instant access to your musical memories whenever you want. Quick Tap: A shortcut on the back of your phone C. Scott Brown / Android Authority While Now Playing is an opt-in feature made apparent the first day you use your Pixel, Quick Tap is one you need to discover for yourself. This feature triggers a specific action instantly whenever you double-tap the back of your phone. To enable it, go to Settings > System > Gestures > Quick Tap to start actions. Here, you can assign the double-tap gesture to a variety of tasks. You can use it to take a screenshot, access Gemini, play or pause media, or even open a specific app. I personally have it set to toggle the flashlight, as it's incredibly convenient and works even when the phone is locked. I prefer to use Quick Tap to launch the flashlight, but there are a bunch of other things you can have it do. Be aware that some actions, like launching an app, will require you to unlock your phone first, which can defeat the 'quick' aspect of the feature. Also, if you find yourself accidentally triggering the gesture fairly often, you can enable the Require stronger taps option on the Quick Tap settings page, which should help reduce that issue. Automate your settings with Rules C. Scott Brown / Android Authority If you want your phone to change settings automatically based on your context, Pixels have a built-in system called Rules. While it isn't as feature-rich as some competitor offerings, like Samsung's Routines, it's still quite useful once configured. On your Pixel, you can find it under Settings > System > Rules. You'll need to enable background services for it to work, so be sure to hit the Next button the first time you visit this page. Pixel's Rules allow you to automatically switch audio states depending on where you are. Once you've given it all the necessary permissions, you can create rules that trigger changes to your phone's audio state based on your geographical location or a specific Wi-Fi network. For instance, you can set your phone to automatically switch to Do Not Disturb when you're at the movie theater and then revert to your normal ringer profile when you connect to your home Wi-Fi. It's a simple but effective way to automate your daily routines. Again, I really wish Google made this more powerful like Samsung has with Routines, but it's a gem of a feature taken for what it is. Get better selfies with gestures and illumination Ryan Haines / Android Authority The Pixel camera has a few tricks up its sleeve that go well beyond just taking good photos. Did you know you can switch between the rear and front-facing cameras with a simple shake? When the camera app is open, two quick twists of your wrist will flip to the selfie camera, and two more will flip it back. If this isn't working, check that it's enabled under Settings > System > Gestures > Flip camera for selfie. There's a helpful GIF on that page that can help you master the wrist-flicking gesture. Selfie fiends will love the wrist-flicking gesture and the cheat code for getting better lighting. This gesture combines powerfully with another shortcut that most people already know about: double-tapping the power button to launch the camera. With these two features combined, you can go from your phone being in your pocket to being ready for a selfie in seconds (take phone out of pocket, double tap power button, flick wrists). Once you've framed your shot, you can even use the volume keys to capture the photo, meaning you can go from your phone being in your pocket to snapping a selfie all with using only one hand and without ever needing to touch your display. Neat! I also have a bonus selfie tip. Another underappreciated tool is Selfie Illumination, which you can find under the More light setting in the camera app. The setting for this is fairly apparent (open the camera app, swap to selfie mode, and tap the gear icon on the left), but Google does a poor job explaining what it is. Contrary to what some might think, it isn't just an AI-powered brightening filter. When enabled, your phone's screen will turn bright white for a moment right before capturing a selfie, acting as a makeshift front-facing flash to illuminate your face. This can dramatically improve the lighting of your self-portraits in dim environments. You'll only need to enable this in the camera's selfie mode settings once for it to stay active permanently whenever you take a selfie. However, it will reset when you restart your phone. Face-aware Auto-Rotate C. Scott Brown / Android Authority Everyone has experienced the annoyance of lying in bed and having your phone's screen rotate to landscape when you don't want it to. Pixels have a clever solution to this problem. If you long-press the Auto-Rotate tile in your Quick Settings, you'll find an option to enable face detection. With this active, your phone will use the front-facing camera to see the orientation of your face. If it detects that you're lying down, it will keep the screen in portrait mode even if the phone itself is horizontal. Hate when your head hits a pillow and your phone goes into landscape mode? This is for you. This is a small touch that removes a common frustration. It also prevents you from needing to even have the Auto-Rotate Quick Tile active since it should be smart enough to know when you really want the phone to be in landscape or portrait mode. That makes room for a different tile to be there, which is nice. Select text and images right from your recent apps C. Scott Brown / Android Authority The Recents screen (or Overview screen, Google can't make up its mind what to call this area of Android) is accessible by swiping up from the bottom of your display and holding. On Pixels, this area has a powerful tool. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see a Select button. Tapping this allows you to highlight and copy text from any of the apps currently displayed in the carousel, without needing to open them individually. You can also share the selected text or start a Google search directly from the tiny menu that pops up whenever any text is selected. Stop taking screenshots of apps and then editing the screenshot before sharing. Use the Select tool! This feature is even more useful for images. Let's say you want to share an image on your phone but don't want to share your whole screen. Instead of taking a screenshot, cropping it, and then sharing, you can simply tap on an image directly from the Recents screen. This allows you to share or save just that specific image, or use Google Lens to search with it. It's a much faster and more efficient way of doing things. Don't ignore the Pixel Tips app! Robert Triggs / Android Authority It's easy to dismiss the Pixel Tips app as just another piece of pre-installed software, the digital equivalent of a car's user manual. But you really should open it and explore. The app is a treasure trove of information, detailing many of the cool things your phone can do that you might not be aware of. If I had a nickel for every Pixel user who's never touched the Pixel Tips app, I wouldn't need to work anymore. The Pixel Tips app is also the best place to find out what new features have arrived with the latest quarterly Pixel Drop. Google makes headlines by announcing a batch of new features for Pixels every quarter, but the rollout can be staggered, and some features are exclusive to certain Pixel models. The Tips app cuts through the confusion by showing you exactly which new features are active and available on your specific device. I now make it a point to check the app every few months to see what's new. Those are my favorite underappreciated Pixel features. Did I miss any? What's your favorite? Let me know in the comments below. Follow
Fox News
17 minutes ago
- Fox News
'Fantastic Four' stars Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby's handsy behavior raises eyebrows and movie hype: expert
Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby, whose recent flirtatious behavior towards one another has raised eyebrows, are just two of Hollywood's mega-stars who have sparked romance rumors from handsy, red-carpet appearances. From gentle neck rubs to hand-holding, the superhero power couple — who play Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic and Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman in the Marvel film, "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" — have been noticeably touchy with one another while promoting the movie. But Pascal, who recently admitted physical touch helps him cope with anxieties, said there's nothing more to it. "I was always one to reach out when I'm facing something that is challenging or making me anxious," the actor, 50, told Men's Health. Kirby also defended her co-star's actions. Recalling the time in which Pascal caught heat after grabbing her hand during an appearance at Comic Con last year, Kirby told Vanity Fair the gesture was innocent. "What happened is we were both incredibly nervous going out in front of thousands of people who love this comic," Kirby said. "He wanted me to know that we were in this together, and I found it a lovely gesture and was very glad to squeeze his hand back." However, Doug Eldridge, founder of Achilles PR, said stars often use this tactic as a way to create buzz. "Nine times out of 10, this tactic is used as a buzz-builder, whether for the studio that financed the film, or the actors themselves, especially if the latter are up-and-comers, who haven't developed household name recognition yet. But again, there is always the '10th time' which could bring skepticism and, more importantly, scrutiny." "Pascal uses touch as a 'grounding' technique to navigate social situations, which might otherwise trigger his anxiety. Skeptics claim that's a farce, but clinical professionals have acknowledged the validity of this technique," Eldridge continued. "Wherever you fall on this particular case, the real 'winner' is the studio, as the internet has been filled with clicks and commentary surrounding Pascal, all of which creates a groundswell of buzz and potential 'butts in the buckets' for the upcoming release of 'The Fantastic Four' re-make." Steve Honig, founder of The Honig Company, told Fox News Digital that it's common for stars to use their on-screen and off-screen chemistry to their advantage during the promotional period of their upcoming project. "There are many ways co-stars can show chemistry on the red carpet without crossing the line into something that might be construed as inappropriate. The key here is to keep it fun and light, not sexual or anything heavy," Honig said. "At the end of the day, a red carpet is a place of work for actors, so the general rule of thumb is to not do anything a 'civilian' shouldn't do in their workplace." "Oftentimes, the intent of red carpet PDA is to generate some additional buzz for the film," he continued. "This can, however, easily backfire and generate negative press about the questionable behavior. Red carpets are great stomping grounds for celebrities to build their brands, and they should use premieres and other red carpet events to that end." "Celebrities, and their reps, need to remember that, unlike Las Vegas, what happens on the red carpet does not always stay on the red carpet," he added. "What happens at a premiere can, and often does, have a huge and lasting impact not only on the specific project but a celebrity's overall image. This can spill over to other projects, endorsements and either damage or build a celebrity's brand." Last month, Scarlett Johansson spoke out after her red carpet kisses with her "Jurassic World Rebirth" co-star Jonathan Bailey went viral. The 40-year-old actress and 37-year-old actor made headlines after locking lips at their film's premiere in London on June 17. On June 23, the two shared another kiss at "Jurassic World Rebirth's" premiere in New York City, where Johansson's husband, "Saturday Night Live" star Colin Jost, was in attendance. During a recent episode of "Today," host Craig Melvin told Johansson that he wanted to ask her about "this kissing thing that you and Jonathan have been doing all over the world." Melvin went on to note that Bailey was "so attractive," to which Johansson responded, "Yeah, you said it!" "Is that why we keep planting lips on him?" Melvin asked. "He's a lovable guy, what can I say?" Johansson replied. "I don't know. We're just friendly people." When Melvin asked whether she was surprised by the public attention to the pair's kisses, Johansson told him, "Nothing surprises me, you know what I mean?" "Nothing surprises me these days," she continued. "But, yeah, I've got a lot of love to give, what can I say?" In 2023, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, who starred together in "Anyone But You," sparked romance rumors as fans caught glimpses of the two filming. At the time, the duo appeared on the "Today" show to promote the film and their friendship was questioned by Hoda Kotb, who asked if there was "a little romance" going on at any point. Throughout the interview, Sweeney and Powell shared little looks, and the "Euphoria" star couldn't stop giggling. While Sweeney laughed in response to the question about their relationship status, Powell answered: "No, but we do love each other. And, honestly, this is one of the most spectacular humans I've ever met. She's really great." In September 2021, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain were the stars of a viral video from their appearance at the Venice International Film Festival in 2021 to promote their show "Scenes From a Marriage," where fans noted the pair seemed to be a little too comfortable with each other. In the viral video, the two were posing with their arms around each other for photos. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until Isaac appeared to kiss and sniff Chastain's underarm area. Isaac spoke on SiriusXM's "The Jess Cagle Show" at the time and offered an explanation for the odd sniffing by comparing himself and Chastain to flatworms. "You know, you can cut them into like a hundred pieces and they will grow a whole new worm out of the little piece. So they're basically kind of immortal, and they've been doing work at the cellular level where they're seeing that the cells kind of talk to each other through electricity and kind of decide, 'Okay you're going to make the head.' 'All right, I'm going to make the tail'…they're communicating through some sort of electro kind of magnetic situation," Isaac explained. "Maybe we should use more actual human language to talk instead of sniffing an armpit and doing things like that," Isaac said. "That's kind of what starts to happen and no matter how much we annoy each other, no matter what happens, it's like, when you get us together, it's like, it's just other stuff that's going on that is making us grow two heads." While Eldridge said the public displays of affection during press are "seldom authentic," some are truly genuine. "It is seldom authentic, but a good rule of thumb is to stay away from terms like 'always' and 'never.' Point being, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn have been together since 1983. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have been married for 40 years. Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Geller have been married for 22 years. Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have been married for 10 years. Improbable and impossible are not the same thing. Just because 'most' of these relationships are manufactured, doesn't mean 'all' of them are." "It's not a question of good or bad [press], but rather inevitable," he said. "The purpose of organizing a global media junket is to drive ticket sales, but the formula is slightly more calculated than the target outcome. Again, the process is simple, not easy: build awareness, create interest/intrigue, generate a call to action."
Bloomberg
17 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
DOGE-Pilled
Listen: Why DOGE's Luke Farritor Followed Elon Musk to DC 00:00 0:00 ✕ Businessweek Photographer: Shawn Brackbill Luke Farritor could have been an artist, or a builder, or someone dedicated to seeing a great historical mystery through. Instead he wound up at the Department of Government Efficiency, slashing, dismantling, undoing. By , Margi Murphy and Jason Leopold Before he was called a patriot and a traitor for following Elon Musk to Washington to join DOGE; before he was hired by the US government despite a résumé that would have been previously rejected; before he was granted extensive access to sensitive data and invited to brief the country's vice president; before he met his Twitter heroes in Silicon Valley; before he became a Thiel Fellow, which required him to become a college dropout; before he was celebrated internationally for using AI to help detect passages in a scroll charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; before all of that, Luke Farritor, now 23, was a homeschooled kid in Lincoln, Nebraska, who called himself lukethecoder64. Back then, he responded to the prompt 'You Know You're a Nerd When…' with 'you listen to 'White 'n nerdy' by Weird Al and think it's a biography of you.' The Martian was one of his favorite books. He was a bell ringer at church. He played piano and golf, chess and Kerbal Space Program. During his high school summers, he helped build an app that could link those in need to local charities. It's still in use. Back then, his father introduced him to an artist, Charley Friedman, who wanted to create a musical installation that people could move through, hearing different notes at different times, an experience individual and communal. 'I've always been interested in how humans are easily manipulated by power, by bright lights,' Friedman says. He needed someone who could code and build and commit to a project that was then a concept. Farritor was around 15 when he began working with Friedman and 19 when they first exhibited Soundtracks for the Present Future, composed of 59 hanging, computer-controlled guitars and mandolins, at a contemporary arts center in Omaha. Farritor called it magical. It was featured on public television in Nebraska and traveled to museums around the country. Friedman always referred to Farritor as the exhibition engineer. Being around artists allowed Farritor to see 'how they approach their careers, how they approach their lives,' he said in a university news story. 'It really rubbed off on me, I think.' He considered becoming an artist. He started to create what he called an exploding toaster. 'He was devising some things that he thought were kind of art pieces,' Friedman says. But at 21, after seven months as an intern at Musk's SpaceX Starbase in Texas, he told Friedman he thought of himself differently: I realized what I love to do is to solve other people's problems. Farritor was an inquisitive, uncommonly talented and sometimes obsessive young man. He had opportunities. He had people who cared about him, and those people had ideas of what he might achieve. Their ideas had nothing to do with Washington. Maybe Farritor didn't know that his decision to help the man he so admired try to slash government spending would mean disappearing from his own life, working secretively but appearing in court documents. That it would mean disappointing and angering some, thrilling others. That in trying to solve one problem, he would play a part in creating chaos and distress and fear. Those he knew would not always be spared. His community in Lincoln would be cleaved. Maybe, some in his hometown say, he didn't know there would be consequences. Luke Farritor is the eldest of four children, raised in a modest house with an American flag out front and a workshop in the basement. The family posed there for a photo. It's on his father's Facebook page. Farritor's mother, Tracy Slocum Farritor, is a physician who calls herself a patriot. She wanted to create an animated show, Renny & Bo, about America's history. Michael Medved, the conservative radio host and author, was a special consultant. 'I think America is the greatest nation on Earth, and I think it's OK to teach that,' she said in a Kickstarter video in 2015. 'That doesn't mean we think any less of other people or other countries.' Her campaign fell short. Farritor told friends she was the best person he knew. Second was his father, Shane Farritor, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who, for much of his son's childhood, was developing a miniature surgical robot with millions of dollars in federal funding. It was l aunched on SpaceX's Falcon 9 and tested on the International Space Station last year. In a talk titled ' Don't Measure, Cut Twice,' he said everyone should make something. 'Making is a better way of thinking.' At the end, he showed photos of his four kids doing just that. Lincoln is a university town, the capital of the state, center of the Silicon Prairie. It's open skies, affordable homes, good schools, liberal-leaning politics, refugee resettlement programs, some 300,000 residents. It's about five hours by plane from either coast, and, for some, this is an opportunity of geography, a chance to distinguish themselves. Shane Farritor is among them. Jeff Raikes is too. He grew up in rural Nebraska, left for Stanford University, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He designed, and later helped fund, the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the university, an honors program with an honor code. The students—their number hovers close to 40 a year now—are called the best and brightest. The university publishes their names; the Nebraska business community takes notice. Posters of the Raikes School's six core values hang in the building where the students live and study. Graduates can still recite them. Among the principles: Follow through on your commitments. Understand the impact of your words and actions. Never sacrifice quality or integrity. Commit to empathy. The school maintains a robust diversity, equity and inclusion statement. Every alum lands a job or a place in a graduate program soon after leaving Raikes, according to the school. For most, being selected for Cohort 2020 was an achievement in and of itself. For Luke Farritor, it was the path of least resistance, he later told a reporter. It was also close to home. During his first year, he invited friends to campfires there. Farritor's family would sometimes join the parties. Friedman describes them as open-minded, intelligent, sparkly—the kind that a homeschooled kid might want to stay around. Members of Cohort 2020 came to realize that, unlike them, Farritor was at Raikes because his parents wanted him to attend. 'School was never a priority for Luke, and that was well understood,' one classmate says. Unlike them, Farritor challenged professors about assignments and skipped classes (to work on the music project, to work on the scrolls). 'It's what kind of set him apart, because he would just grind on side projects and learn,' says another classmate. He calls Farritor 'cracked.' For coders, that's a compliment. Farritor didn't always invest himself in group projects, some classmates say. Raikes is supposed to be all about collaboration. The program culminates in a project meant to solve a real problem for a company or organization. In November of his senior year, Farritor told his group that he would likely drop out before theirs was complete, according to one of them. They did just fine without him, winning second prize at what's known as the Design Studio Showcase. It's held at the Nebraska Innovation Campus, where Farritor's father helped plan a makerspace for the university and the Lincoln community. Farritor—no surprise—set up a workshop of his own in his dorm room. 'I had a suspicion that if I needed a part for anything, there was a 90% chance he would have it,' says a classmate who asked him for help with her own side project. 'His room was full of little wires, computer chip boards, mini embedded system computers, things in boxes.' They mostly talked about coding. 'Luke would share ideas for how I could learn on my own,' she says. Some other students had different recollections of Farritor: that he once redid a female classmate's work on a project without consulting her; that he questioned the need for an international conference for women in tech that Raikes sent students to attend. When he dropped out, a few women noted with some satisfaction that his departure tilted the gender balance: At graduation it was 19 men and 18 women, as close to equal as it had been since the school's founding in 2001. On Politichat, a group chat set up by Raikes students, Farritor identified himself as 'hopelessly libright.' That's 'lib' for libertarian. 'He would be passionate about being contrary,' says one classmate. 'I don't know the extent that he believed in some of the things. He just wanted to push people.' That wasn't always welcome. Like a lot of group chats, it became a 'pretty rough echo chamber,' wrote one classmate who created a private chat, Calm Politichat, to allow dissenting opinions to be heard more openly. Farritor was invited to join. He was there, he was on Twitter, he was on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and GitHub. He was almost 19. 'I think college as a whole is overrated… Peter theil [sic] had a good bit about this' Luke Farritor, Nov. 16, 2020 Calm Politichat Farritor's political discussion seemed to mirror his own Twitter feed—among its prominent figures were the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who would go all in for Donald Trump in 2024; Peter Thiel, the libertarian who helped fund Trump's first campaign; and Elon Musk. 'He thought that Musk was the closest thing to Iron Man. He loved that Musk was pushing the envelope in all these ways,' says one classmate. 'I remember at one point Musk was going on a big series about how everyone needs to have more children,' says another. 'Farritor started talking about that in Politichat. I remember thinking: 'Why is this something we're talking about?' What he talked about was based on the whims of his algorithms. We were participating more in university life.' Farritor's circle at Raikes telescoped over the years. 'I think I could describe him as becoming more narrow,' a classmate once close to him says. By the time he dropped out, some from those campfires weren't talking with him regularly, or at all. Most of those who had remained in touch didn't respond to our requests for interviews. One works for Virtual Incision, the robotics company Farritor's father co-founded; a second recently left. Shane Farritor declined our interview requests. Farritor's classmates who talked with us asked not to be identified because the political atmosphere is so charged. Farritor didn't respond to several requests for an interview or answer our written questions, but in early 2024 he did speak with Bloomberg Businessweek for a cover story about the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to identify letters and words in the ancient scrolls. And right up until the presidential inauguration, he was very much online. We have glimpses of a young man's life, refracted over time, his confidence and ambitions appearing here and there, his desire to be noticed, be weird, belong, be close to his heroes. A video from January 2022, when Farritor is a sophomore: He and Friedman are installing Soundtracks at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. Dozens of hanging guitars and mandolins play Satyagraha, originally an opera by Philip Glass. Farritor is lanky, masked, hair flopped over his forehead, glasses, orange sneakers. He walks through the room as if he's conducting. 'They don't know that I'm learning about C++17' @LukeFarritor, Aug. 8, 2022 Tweet, with photo of Farritor hunched over his laptop as friends hang out As Cohort 2020 began their junior year, Farritor interviewed for a semester-long internship at SpaceX— they asked me all about the guitar project, he told Friedman. He had to solve a math problem in a matter of days. He barely left his room. Someone visiting Farritor's suitemate saw that Farritor had written calculations all over the mirrors. 'It could be that the problem demanded that intensity,' the classmate says. 'It's also true that Luke would hyperfixate on a project.' Later, when asked on X about his process for projects, Farritor replied: 'There is no process. I just think about them nonstop.' When Farritor arrived at Starbase in Texas in January 2023, everyone was preparing for the first test flight of Starship, the world's largest rocket, designed to one day carry people to Mars. Farritor was assigned to the launchpad software team. He later described his work to Businessweek as chaotic in the best way possible. He said he'd found a fuel leak on the pad a few weeks before the April launch, which was a really big deal. On the day of liftoff, he joined a crowd watching from a spot several miles away. He said he could tell when a routine he programmed went into action: 'Oh my goodness, that was cool.' When the rocket blasted off, concrete chunks of the launchpad flew in all directions, debris spread for miles and shockwaves shattered at least one window in a nearby town. Minutes later, Starship spun out of control and SpaceX had to blow it up. One morning in March, while driving to Starbase, Farritor heard Nat Friedman —former chief executive officer of GitHub—describe the Vesuvius Challenge on a podcast. The volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 A.D. also preserved a vast library of ancient scrolls, the Herculaneum papyri, but they were so brittle that most have never been opened. A computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, Brent Seales, had figured out how to virtually unwrap 3D scans of the charred scrolls and, with his graduate students, train artificial intelligence algorithms to detect the presence of ink. Now they were making those scans and data available and offering prizes to anyone who could extract the first words and passages. 'I think there's like a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity and get the data and get nerd sniped by it, and we'll solve it this year,' Friedman said. And Farritor was like, 'Oh my goodness, that could be me.' He thought to himself, 'You can win money, you can meet Nat Friedman, you can make an impact on history.' Farritor began working with the scans during evenings and weekends, posting his progress on the group's Discord, GitHub and sometimes Twitter. So did some 1,500 other people. Businessweek called them a volunteer army of nerds. In mid-October, Farritor accepted the First Letters Prize, and a $40,000 check, at a press conference at the University of Kentucky. He'd found the word 'porphyras,' or purple. 'It's a funny story,' he said. Late one August evening, he was at a friend's birthday party, sitting in a corner. He got a text alerting him to a new piece of a scroll to work with and ran his detection algorithm on it. When he checked his phone later, he could make out three letters. His reaction: 'Oh my goodness.' 'Holy cow.' 'I just completely freaked out, I almost fell over, I almost cried.' He sent a screenshot to JP Posma, who was managing the contest, and to his family. Onstage, Farritor said the next challenge—to identify four passages by the end of the year for the Grand Prize—was absolutely doable. Before Farritor left Kentucky, a filmmaker in Naples, Italy, interviewed him over Zoom for a documentary about Seales' yearslong effort, The Library of Darkness. Posma told him: You need to drop out of school, kid. You've got better things to do. Later that month, Farritor traveled to Los Angeles to help Charley Friedman install Soundtracks at Azusa Pacific University. Afterward, Farritor told Friedman he wasn't going back to Lincoln right away: 'He was going to stay and meet some people, like Nat Friedman. People who are more in line with what he clearly knows is his future.' Farritor attended a Roman dinner at Nat Friedman's home in the Bay Area. They ate dishes seasoned with garum, a Phoenician sauce Farritor had only read about in history books. He met Tyler Cowen, an economist favored in Silicon Valley: 'He's another person I've looked up to,' Farritor told Businessweek. He met Patrick Collison, who co-founded Stripe Inc., and David Holz, who founded Midjourney. 'What's cool is I go there, and all these people care about me,' he said. They asked about Starbase and the scrolls. He said he received a lot of exciting job offers at a lot of great places. 'It was a really, really magical experience.' 'Cool people on Twitter are cool people IRL' @LukeFarritor, Oct. 25, 2023 X post When Farritor speaks to Businessweek in January 2024, it's winter break at Raikes. He's in his parents' basement, computers in the background, family photos on the wall. He knows that, along with two graduate students in Europe, he's won the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize. They had teamed up and will share the $700,000 prize. The announcement will come early in February and with it more recognition, more invitations, job offers and, Farritor hopes, a place in history: 'People are going to write Wikipedia pages about this.' He also knows he's won a grant from Cowen's Emergent Ventures that he'll use to travel to Europe. Farritor says that when they'd met in California, Cowen was like, Kid, you've got to see the world. One of Farritor's sisters will join him. 'About to fly to Europe. I hope they have Diet Coke,' he posts on X. And he knows that he's leaving school and moving to Palo Alto, California. He can't share what he'll be doing, only what he's not—working for SpaceX. 'It's the only big tech company I'd want to ever work for. It's definitely the best company in the world, in my opinion,' he says. But he doesn't want to be what he calls 'another Level 2 software engineer working on some very specific subset of the locks.' Good for those people, though. 'I know them and they're great, but I'm not sure that's what I want to do.' 'I don't think I saw a single Stanford, Harvard or MIT student work on the scroll prize. You'd think several dozen students from those schools would want to work on this. Why didn't that happen? What failed? Is the prize less cool than I think it is? What are they doing instead?' @LukeFarritor, Jan. 30, 2024 X post 'Behind (fr)enemy lines' @LukeFarritor, Jan. 30, 2024 X post, at Blue Origin 'I did this while interning at starbase! @elonmusk' @LukeFarritor, Feb. 5, 2024 X post, on day of Grand Prize announcement 'It's not every day that your biggest hero sends 2 million dollars to support your archaeology passion project, but today is not every day. Thanks @elonmusk!' @LukeFarritor, Feb. 16, 2024 X post Farritor gave an exit interview to the University of Nebraska student paper in early March. By then, he could disclose that he would be working for Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross at their venture fund, NFDG. He said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A week later, Farritor was at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles for the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize ceremony. The leader of his team, Youssef Nader, hadn't been able to get a US visa in time. But Julian Schilliger joined Farritor onstage as Friedman presented their $700,000 check. 'The atmosphere was electric,' says Seales. 'It really felt like a kind of miracle had occurred.' Contest rules required that the winners share their models and code. Work on the scrolls would continue, and all three were offered positions with the project. Farritor declined. Then he left for Silicon Valley. Farritor was named one of 20 Thiel Fellows in March 2024—19 men and one woman. Among their qualifications: They had to give up on college and, as one fellow put it, 'be great.' They got $100,000 and access to a Silicon Valley network. Thiel, who started PayPal with Musk and others and is a major shareholder in Palantir Technologies Inc., began the fellowship in 2011 almost as a lark. Even Farritor had trouble describing to a friend exactly what he'd be doing. During that spring, Farritor spent many of his days at the NFDG office in Palo Alto researching potential emerging technologies in the space industry. He traveled. 'I will be in Boston this week! Reach out if you're in the area!' he posted on X. He attended his first Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha to see Warren Buffett: 'I've never been to one and should go to one while he's still around.' He made other trips home: 'The Sandhills of Nebraska is one of my favorite places in earth.' 'Can anybody help me get a tee time?' During a visit to Lincoln over Easter, he stopped by the Raikes School. One classmate recalls him saying how much he enjoyed being in Silicon Valley, where he was around people with similar attitudes. Silicon Valley seemed to return the welcome. Farritor was praised, popular, noticed as one of Nat Friedman's crew, a Thiel Fellow, a grand prize winner. Farritor posted about René Girard, a French philosopher who'd taught at Stanford and influenced Thiel, and apparently JD Vance too. Online, Girard is a potent name, sometimes a meme. Farritor wondered if Girard should be made a saint. He cited Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and critic of modern liberal culture: 'There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.' He recommended books about the discovery of Pluto, the Wright brothers, nanosystems and anything by Cowen. He favored deregulation. He wrote that it would be faster and cheaper to build a high-speed passenger railway on the moon than in San Jose. He expressed antipathy toward Stanford and NASA. He asked a lot of questions. He tested his ideas. He was a 22-year-old in Silicon Valley. 'New idea: if the regulations are thick enough to stop a bullet, they are automatically nullified' @LukeFarritor, June 5, 2024 X post He wanted to discover the hypothetical Planet Nine. He started an unofficial Discord channel for a Neuralink compression challenge. (Musk co-founded Neuralink Corp.) He continued to work with the scrolls—the Vesuvius Challenge is ongoing, with more prizes in the offing—once posting that he'd be livestreaming his efforts while delayed at an airport. 'Let's do a Diablo x Scrolls colab stream @elonmusk' @LukeFarritor, June 9, 2024 X post 'based and scroll pilled. unbelievably bull signal. @LukeFarritor is going to win. mattress, rgb monitor, ikea train set, 1070 gpu (to solve scrolls) is all you need.' @willdepue, July 12, 2024 X post, with a photo of Farritor's room That summer and fall, Farritor got involved with the AI Grant program created by Friedman and Gross. They awarded startup founders not money, but mentorship and cloud computing credits. During what they called founder days, Farritor sat to the side, taking notes as entrepreneurs practiced their pitches. One former classmate says Farritor would rather have been coding. 'I think he enjoyed the networking part of it, though, and he met a ton of people.' 'The world is so shockingly inefficient! So much low hanging fruit!' @LukeFarritor, Sept. 9, 2024 X post 'Many in my graduating CS class couldn't write JavaScript or Python' @LukeFarritor, Sept. 12, 2024 X post 'you can judge a man's character by which 3-letter org hed abolish if given the choice' @LukeFarritor, Oct. 23, 2024 X, reposting @nearcyan As Musk threw money and energy into Trump's run for president, as other smart coders tried to win the next Vesuvius Challenge prize, as his former Raikes classmates started their first jobs, it's possible that Farritor wanted more, those classmates say. His skills were mostly unused, his promise seemingly untapped. His father had said: Make things. Nat Friedman said: Do things. And soon, it seemed, something came along. 'Working overtime to ensure your tax dollars will be spent wisely!' @DOGE, Nov. 13, 2024 X post '… We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting … Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.' @DOGE, Nov. 14, 2024 X post In the days before Thanksgiving, Farritor returned to Lincoln to accept an award from the Heartland Robotics Cluster for 'his exceptional contributions to AI and the Nebraska tech community.' Onstage at the Innovation Campus conference center, surrounded by his family, Farritor talked about his work with the scrolls. He hasn't spoken publicly in his hometown since. That evening, Farritor joined friends for the Thanksgiving Throwdown, a combat sports event outside Omaha. On the drive back he told them about being at the same house parties as Musk. He hinted that he was working on something new. 'Happy Thanksgiving to all– even the haters and losers!' @LukeFarritor, Nov. 28, 2024 X, reposting @willdepue In early December, Farritor joined that same group on a Discord call. One of them says Farritor told the group: Guys, you can't talk about this, but I'm actually going to be a part of DOGE. This might actually be a thing I can do. The reaction was muted. Some weren't sure if this Department of Government Efficiency was a serious effort. But they understood the draw for Farritor. One person on the call says he didn't think Farritor was that excited about cutting government waste, just working with Musk. He asked if Farritor would get to meet Musk and recalls Farritor saying: That's the dream. '@DOGE doesn't fear the storm. It is the storm.' @elonmusk, Dec. 7, 2024 X post One DOGE member, Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, said the hiring process included 'vibe checks' over calls on Signal. Did you vote for Kamala Harris? Are you comfortable working for Donald Trump? Lavingia heard that many other coders had been rejected: They had the wrong vibes. Once Farritor had been vetted by DOGE, he had to be officially hired into the US Digital Service. The group, part of the Executive Office of the President, had been bringing in tech experts to help modernize the government since 2014. It was the gateway for those joining DOGE. In November, Farritor sent his résumé with a one-line note: 'Super passionate about serving my country in the U.S.D.S.!' 'Luke's résumé didn't pass muster,' says a former senior government official who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation for discussing the hiring of Farritor and other DOGE members. 'It's not to say he isn't smart.' But the USDS required applicants to have a college degree and at least five years of industry experience. 'You have to bring some expertise. It's not just like, 'Oh, I wrote a Python AI thing.' Yeah, that's not gonna cut it.' The official says that many of the younger software engineers who'd been approved by DOGE would have been rejected by USDS: 'They actually don't have the wisdom from having burned your fingers a number of times.' And, the official says, they hadn't developed an essential skill. 'It is as important to be able to influence people in power as it is to write code.' The official also knew that none of that mattered. The USDS wasn't supposed to conduct its usual screening for Farritor or the others: 'We had to make sure we didn't throw out people we shouldn't.' We reached out to the White House about DOGE's hiring practices. In an email, spokesperson Harrison Fields wrote: 'DOGE rigorously evaluated its technical and engineering talent by administering an industry-standard coding exercise, which validated every member of the DOGE team's capabilities and skill set. Additionally, the recruiting team conducted reference and background checks to confirm each employee's qualifications. We are proud of the selfless contributions to the country and the American taxpayer from those committed to the President's mission of ending waste, fraud, and abuse.' On Jan. 2, at 10:49 p.m., Farritor sent a message to the Thiel Fellows' WhatsApp chat: 'Hi all, DOGE is urgently looking for operations and software engineers to help cut 2 trillion from the national spend. Please reach out if interested!' Thirteen of the 19 other fellows responded with heart and dog face emojis. In the weeks ahead of Trump's inauguration, Farritor went dark. He disappeared from GitHub, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. On LinkedIn, his location is Antarctica. He played online chess as lukeb0i on Jan. 7, his last game for months. On Jan. 11 he reposted a comment from Musk: 'Incompetence in the limit is indistinguishable from sabotage.' He hasn't posted on X since. On the first Sunday in February, Wired magazine identified six of those who had responded to Musk's call. Luke Farritor was among them. They were easy to mock, maybe to fear: They were young and inexperienced, all male, part of another army of nerds. One called himself Big Balls and, Bloomberg News revealed, had been fired from an internship for sharing information with a competitor. The Wall Street Journal reported that another had posted racist comments. None were as tech famous as Farritor. The White House's executive order creating DOGE said it would modernize technology and maximize productivity. 'It took a couple of weeks to realize that, despite the stated mission, their main focus would be destruction,' says a current government employee who, like others we interviewed, requested anonymity because they're not authorized to speak with the media. 'That it was less about evolving and improving than tearing down to the floorboards. I think part of what confused everybody was that you had these foot soldiers you were seeing and you assumed that they were there just to support the generals, but they weren't. The generals had delegated everything to the foot soldiers.' On Friday, Jan. 31, Farritor was invited to an 'urgent meeting' about the US Agency for International Development. Over the weekend, Musk called the agency, which provides humanitarian assistance to millions of the world's poorest people, a criminal organization and a viper's nest full of radical-left Marxists who hate America. After midnight on that Sunday, he wrote on X: 'We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.' The New York Times reported that Farritor had sent an email to DOGE colleagues in the days before. He'd conducted a review of USAID payments made after Trump had ordered the agency to pause development spending. 'I could be wrong,' Farritor wrote. 'My numbers could be off.' The great undoing, with its firings, humiliation, lacerating and gloating, received a lot of gleeful encouragement on X. But in the days to come, someone posted 'traitor' under Farritor's TikTok videos. Someone on Discord warned him that the internet 'hates fascists.' Another that he would end up in prison. In Lincoln, some came out in support of DOGE and Farritor, appreciated what they called his sacrifice, looked forward to what they hoped would be a smaller government with fewer regulations. That Sunday night, Scott Henderson, who mentors young entrepreneurs and knows the Farritors, wrote an email to Farritor's father. He says he asked something like: Is this true? As a father of a son the same age, you can do something about this. If this is true, what are you going to do about this? He didn't get a response. Charley Friedman checked in and didn't hear back either. 'Fascist' appeared in the comments to a LinkedIn post by Shane Farritor that had nothing to do with his son. A talk he was supposed to give at the Nebraska Innovation Studio a few days later— Lab to Launch —was canceled after online threats to disrupt it. A fight broke out in the Great Ferriter Family Facebook group, a forum with 900 members, including Luke and Shane. (The group's page notes that 'Ferriter is variously spelled as Ferriter, Farritor, Ferreter, or Feirtear or even other spellings.') One view of DOGE: 'It's a department within the current US administration that a young family member was appointed to because of his brilliance and achievements.' Another: 'It's a collection of unqualified cyber criminals led by a South African immigrant who is illegally accessing private information.' None of the Lincoln Farritors got involved. Luke's uncle, Pat Farritor, did speak with the Flatwater Free Press in February: 'Obviously he's a lot smarter than you and I,' he said of his nephew, 'and I know he's going to make the right decisions.' When we called recently, he declined to comment. The moderators of a Discord server for Raikes alumni and students banned Farritor: 'Luke has gone from simply disagreeing with many of us to actively fighting to hurt us in a position of governmental power.' Former classmates were surprised he had joined DOGE. Some were disturbed, some angry, some proud. 'Luke doesn't represent Raikes, and he isn't a product of it,' says one. 'It felt cool for someone from the Raikes School to be in the limelight,' says another. 'Then it very quickly turned to a little bit of concern.' A third texted Farritor something like: Hey man, saw the news and am rooting for you. Farritor replied something like: Thank you. Hope you and your family are doing well. Even some who believed he was doing harm were still concerned enough to inquire about him: Thanks, I'm OK. But when a former friend posted an article critical of Farritor and DOGE on Instagram, Farritor replied with a meme of a crying baby and the caption: 'When the corrupt elites can't access USAID anymore.' Farritor was blocked by that account too. The day after the Wired story came out, Nat Friedman posted on X: 'Luke Farritor is a national treasure.' Musk replied: 'The quality of the @DOGE Team is epic.' When we reached out to Friedman, he didn't respond. Another investor who runs AI Grant asked the recipients not to speak with us either, according to a message we saw. None of the Thiel Fellows would comment about Farritor. Posma and Cowen declined to talk with us. Casey Handmer, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who contributed to Farritor's work on the Vesuvius Challenge and says they remain in contact, emailed a statement. It says in part: 'His salt-of-the-Earth American patriotism has driven him to Washington to work on a problem that poses an existential risk to the survival of the United States, at considerable risk to himself and his family.' They were called the DOGE kids, the DOGE bros, Muskovites and Muskrats. They sometimes walked the halls of Washington with Musk, who moved around with his own security guards. They bragged about how hard they were working. At first they slept on the sixth floor of the General Services Administration building; one supporter sent biotracking covers for their mattresses. Some moved into an Airbnb known as DOGE Town, dined out together. 'They come as a group,' says the former senior government official. 'That's the whole DOGE thing. It's all DOGE all the time. Like they're literally not given the mental space to go have an independent life experience and perhaps reflect on what they're doing.' They expected loyalty from government employees: What do you think of Musk? What do you think of his companies? Musk promised transparency, but they operated in secrecy. For the first month no one would confirm who was overseeing their efforts. Media reports named Steve Davis, who'd helped Musk cut costs at X and SpaceX, as being effectively in charge. DOGE members didn't identify themselves when they came into an agency, government employees told us, and demanded access to sensitive data but wouldn't explain why. They communicated on Signal, where they could make their messages disappear. They shielded their work from public-records review. No one from DOGE, including Musk and Davis, replied to our emailed questions about their work or Farritor. They were busy—and Farritor may have been among the busiest. 'Good God. You'd see him and think that he must be harmless,' says a current government employee. 'And I guess he would be if other people weren't giving him an obscene amount of power and access and telling him to move fast and break things.' Farritor helped assess, slash or dismantle at least nine departments and agencies after USAID— the Offices of Personnel Management and of Management and Budget; the Departments of Education, Energy, Labor, and Health and Human Services; the National Science Foundation; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—according to interviews with dozens of current and former government employees, and lawsuits and records seen by Businessweek. On Friday, Feb. 7, Farritor and four other young men from DOGE walked onto the fourth-floor executive suite of the CFPB. Erie Meyer, who'd just resigned as the chief technologist and was packing up her office, could identify only one: Farritor. 'I recognized him, because I have been a follower of artificial intelligence since the '90s, and he worked on decoding the scroll, and he just looks extremely distinctive,' she says. Meyer noticed Farritor and others jiggling the handles of locked office doors, trying to get in. There may be workplaces where that would be acceptable, but it's taboo in a law enforcement agency, she says. 'We lock our office doors, because there may be extremely sensitive materials about ongoing investigations against publicly traded firms and victims and all sorts of things like that on our desks.' She approached the five: 'Can I help you?' They said they were looking for some sort of document but didn't elaborate. 'I think they were surprised to have been confronted.' Farritor kept quiet. Meyer wanted to think the best of him. 'I love historical mysteries. I was kind of like maybe this person cares about learning from our past mistakes or learning from the past to inform our future,' she says. 'I was naively hopeful.' A little while later, in her car, waiting to exit the garage, her phone lit up with notifications. Musk had just posted on X: 'CFPB RIP.' Some of Farritor's classmates wondered about the power he seemed to have been given. 'Like the entirety of DOGE is scary. It's very much like going into government and dismantling the core foundations. It's scary from that perspective. And it's scary that it's 22- and 23-year-olds doing it. And I'm saying this as a 23-year-old,' one classmate says. 'Normally I think experience shouldn't matter all that much. But for the government I would like people to have experience.' Farritor had at least eight email addresses. He worked in agency conference rooms, behind closed doors. He worked on 'Defend the Spend,' a section of the DOGE website where agencies had to provide the rationale for every expense approval. He was regularly invited to connect, sync and catch up at online meetings with agency officials. He was also invited to a deposition prep meeting; he's been referenced in at least 23 lawsuits. He was invited to join 17 others in the Vice President's Ceremonial Office to update Vance on DOGE's efforts. 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy … They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.' Elon Musk, Feb. 28, 2025 Joe Rogan's podcast DOGE, with Farritor on board, has curtailed the HIV/AIDS prevention program that experts say saved millions of lives; withdrawn research, public-health and cultural grants because they included words like 'gender,' 'trans,' 'diversity,' 'race,' 'women,' 'justice,' 'equality' and 'climate'; gained access to sensitive data; fired thousands of civil servants. 'He's young, he's early in his career, and he wanted to impress certain people,' says Lavingia, who's one of the few at DOGE who didn't go along with it all. He was fired after telling a journalist that he was impressed by the efficiency of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He briefly encountered Farritor there. 'You're not going to get asked by Steve Davis to do this and then in the room be like, 'I'm not going to do that.' You're going to be like, 'Oh, I can totally pull that off in 15 minutes with some software that gets all these files from their computer so we can see what they're doing.'' In a lawsuit filed in February, one former government employee calls the breadth of Farritor's access to data at Health and Human Services 'without precedent.' Another, Jeffrey Grant, who'd overseen consumer and insurance information at Medicare and Medicaid, calls it alarming. Farritor could get into systems used for payment management, grants, health-care accounting, acquisitions and human resources. He could get into the National Institutes of Health's grant management and contract systems, as well as the Medicare and Medicaid acquisition system and its integrated data repository, which includes information on claims, beneficiaries and providers, according to the lawsuit's records. He could access and two contracting systems for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Signal chats, employees shared sightings of Farritor and his colleagues walking around Food and Drug Administration and NIH buildings, observing workers and asking what they did. Some employees told us they feared seeing his name on a video call or pop up in their inbox. Fear changed to loathing. 'The DOGE team wasn't what I expected,' says a current government employee who's interacted with Farritor and other core members of DOGE. 'Marketed as tech geniuses, yet they could barely keep up with basic tasks. In reality, they were overconfident, drunk on power and utterly clueless. They giggled and asked me how my day was going—right as they hit the keys to obliterate nearly a decade of my work. There wasn't even a flicker of understanding or care. It wasn't just the loss that gutted me. It was the audacity of their casual cruelty.' Late April at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln: trees in bloom, the Bathtub Dogs a capella group singing near the Jackie Gaughan Multicultural Center, students playing cornhole. The door to Shane Farritor's office is closed. No one answers a knock. Farritor isn't available at Virtual Incision either. The lobby displays the many patents he holds and a version of the mini-robot launched into space. The surgical robot's early development at the university was funded by $4.2 million in grants from the US Army, about $400,000 from NIH and $100,000 from NASA to prepare for that test mission aboard the International Space Station. During the pandemic, Virtual Incision secured a loan of about $262,000 from the Small Business Administration to pay staff salaries, and Farritor himself received a loan for close to $21,000. He, along with engineers at the company, helped design and manufacture face shields for Nebraska's hospitals at the makerspace. Virtual Incision has raised more than $100 million in venture capital funding, by that measure making it one of Lincoln's most successful companies already. It's won approval by the FDA to begin marketing its robots for use in colon surgery. The company declined to comment for this story. Farritor does answer a knock on the front door of his home around dinnertime. He steps out, locks the door behind him. He's stern, in jeans, a red UNL sweatshirt and baseball cap. He walks to his pickup truck in the driveway as he says it's too dangerous for his family to talk about his son or DOGE or the threats they've received. Then he heads off. That evening, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gives a talk—'The Cosmic Perspective'—at a performing arts center in Lincoln to mark Earth Day. It seats more than 2,000 people and is sold out. Early in his presentation, Tyson illustrates the power of exponential growth with a picture of Musk and an estimate of his wealth: $330 billion. The audience boos. At the conclusion of his talk, Tyson remains onstage to share a few thoughts about the government's stance against NASA, against science. 'We'll go backward, and the rest of the world will move forward,' he says. 'We're supposed to make the next generation proud of us.' Shane Farritor—he's Dr. Farritor on campus—briefly appears at the Raikes Design Studio Showcase later that week. It's a big celebration, drawing professors and alumni, families, local business owners and executives, the Raikes board members and Jeff Raikes himself. The school's executive director, Steve Cooper, had been welcoming earlier but said he couldn't talk about Farritor. University rules. Raikes isn't exactly eager to comment but does say: 'Luke is a great talent. I wish he was still here.' At that time, DOGE had cut at least $28 million in federal grants for the university. This came after UNL itself had to cut $5 million from its budget because of diminished state funding, and the university system was preparing to cut as much as $20 million more. What was lost or disrupted this spring: A study of agricultural methods to help the poorest farmers around the world. A project to help Indigenous communities adopt traditional and sustainable farming to mitigate food insecurity. A project to 'cultivate a diverse engineering workforce.' (The dean of Farritor's department, who was overseeing that effort, didn't respond to requests for comment.) A new program to recruit, pay for and otherwise support students from rural areas to return as teachers. 'It's a profound undermining of our future when we don't invest in our young. That's what our program is designed to do,' says one of its leaders, Amanda Morales. What was lost beyond the university: opportunity, says one of Shane Farritor's childhood friends, Kirk Zeller. He runs two medical device companies and helps others get going. Those kinds of early-stage companies rely on funding from NIH and the Department of Defense. 'Companies won't make it when otherwise they might have,' he says. 'All I do is raise money now, and it is brutal.' He, like many in Nebraska, believes the government should be more efficient and accountable. 'But I think we're all a little surprised by the execution,' he says of DOGE. 'They could come out of this as villains or heroes. It's a great concept and could be beneficial to every taxpayer, and if they get it on a good course, Luke could have a lot of opportunities afterward. If it continues in the way it is now, it's going to be hard for him.' That, says Zeller, would be a shame. In February, Scott Henderson wrote that email to Farritor's father: Please talk to your son. In April, he says: 'We are a small community, we have to work together. Some people are cutting each other out. Whatever comes, there must be people ready to pick up the pieces, repair, build for the future.' In April, The Library of Darkness —the film about Brent Seales' quest to learn the secrets of the scrolls and his work with the Vesuvius Challenge—lost the last $50,000 of a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Work had to halt. Even though most of the grant was restored, the money came too late. The film's premiere in London this fall, hosted by the Herculaneum Society, had to be canceled. 'I don't even have the words to describe how backwards this is,' says Laura Azevedo, executive director of the Filmmakers Collaborative, which supports the documentary. 'My project is redemptive. It's fixing something that is broken,' says Seales of the Herculaneum scrolls. 'I would love to believe the people working on our government are taking the same approach, that they know what's there is valuable and important, and rather than destroy it, they redeem it. We're called to be fixers in this world, that's what we're called to do.' In May, as DOGE entered its fifth month of operation, Fox News aired a meeting that Musk had led at 10 p.m. the night before in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House. Twenty men sat around the conference table, most in suits. The DOGE members were nervous, earnest, cocky. One who dropped out of Harvard University to join DOGE said: 'Most of campus hates me now.' The host, Jesse Watters, asked: 'Who is Big Balls?' Musk replied: 'That should be obvious.' There was laughter around the table. Some noted that they'd encountered government workers who had great ideas and who wanted to make changes. One described how they're modernizing the antiquated retirement process. 'We'd like to give a big thank-you to all the government employees who are helping reduce the waste and fraud,' Musk said. 'We really couldn't do it without you.' On Musk's right was Watters. On his left: Steve Davis, Sam Corcos (soon to be chief information officer at the Department of the Treasury) and Luke Farritor. That's the dream. Farritor wore a tie, sat up straight, didn't say anything that made it on air. We got a glimpse at Farritor's work calendar for the month. May 1: An OMB 'connect' on the National Science Foundation May 9: A Microsoft Teams meeting to discuss grants to the Department of Labor with Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer, and Westley Everette, a department official May 19: A quick sync about the Department of Labor with Everette and a DOGE liaison May 27: A Microsoft Teams meeting with one person at the Justice Department and another at the FBI On May 30, Musk joined the president in the Oval Office to formally announce he was leaving DOGE. He'd promised to save the government $2 trillion, revised that to $1 trillion and departed as DOGE claimed to have cut $150 billion in federal spending by its own unverified accounting. He said DOGE was like Buddhism. It didn't need the Buddha. The next day, as senior staff like Davis followed Musk out of Washington, Farritor became a permanent government employee. He's a senior adviser at the General Services Administration, designated a GS-15, the highest salary rank for civilians, earning $167,603. He was living in a historic neighborhood in the District of Columbia, being driven around in a black SUV. Then: Musk blew up. The insults and threats that spewed between the world's richest man and its most powerful brought schadenfreude, foreboding and, for those relying on Musk's status in Washington, anxiety. Then: Musk apologized. Then he promised to start a new political party. Will the young coders Musk brought to Washington remain? If they leave, what are their prospects? Jan English-Lueck, an anthropologist who's been studying Silicon Valley engineers since the 1990s, says Farritor and others made a wager that will be 'intellectually and emotionally celebrated,' no matter DOGE's success or failure. 'To gamble like that shows you understand the theater of Silicon Valley.' On July 23, Trump spoke at an AI summit in Washington. Afterward, there was a private party at a new members-only club. Farritor was among those invited. Back at the GSA building, where Farritor is working, the sixth floor is no longer closed to all but DOGE members, government officials told us. The mattresses have been stacked, the Ping-Pong tables folded up. Signs declaring 'Authorized Access Only' have been removed from the elevators. The security checkpoint on the floor is gone, so is the armed guard. Here, DOGE's ambitions are being curtailed, its leader no longer welcome. —With Ellen Huet More On Bloomberg
