In a move on the petty-but-harmful bar of shutting down the White House Spanish-language page and the removal of words such as diversity and fairness from the FBI core values, the National Park Service (NPS) has erased references to transgender and queer people from the official website for the Stonewall National Monument due to a executive order issued by President Donald Trump.
A two-gender nation?
Last month, the president declared that the federal government will only recognize two gendersmale and female. Since then, federal agencies have been removing references to trans, queer, and intersex people from their pages, including those of the the NPS, which has erased references to transgender and queer people from its official website for Stonewall.
LGBTQ+ is now also shortened to LGB on the NPS website. According to an archived version of the page posted by CNN, it had previously said “LGBTQ+.” The organization has not yet responded to our request for comment.
Honoring brave pioneers
The Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center opened June 28, 2024, marking the 55th anniversary of the of the Stonewall Rebellion, where LGBTQ+ activistsincluding trans peoplekicked off the modern fight for equality. A program of Pride Live, it was the first LGBTQIA+ visitor center in the National Park Service.
In response to Trumps tactic, Pride Live and the visitor center published a statement on their websites denouncing the move:
“Our space is inextricably linked with and honors the brave pioneers, especially transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals, who led the Stonewall Rebellion,” the statement read. “Independently owned and operated, and 100% supported by donations, we will continue our mission to ensure that every person has access to learn about and see themselves in history.”
Erik Bottcher, a member of the New York City Council, told CNN: Hes trying to cleave our community apart and divide us. Hes not going to succeed. Lesbians and gays are not going abandon our transgender siblings. We are one community.
Pride Live has made clear it will stand against the erasure of the existence and contributions of trans and queer people from the narrative: Through the creation of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, were unwavering in our effort to protect and preserve Stonewalls legacy and history, the organization said.
Government websites have been moving to erase references to transgender and nonbinary communities since Trump retook the White House. Last month, the U.S. State Department updated its page for queer travelers, which now says “LGB Travelers.”
A young DARPA-backed startup with a fresh spin on a low-power computer chip has raised over $100 million in a Series B funding round, a sign of the wild appetite for more energy-efficient ways to build bigger and better AI.
The company, EnCharge AI, aims to move AI’s heaviest workloads from big, power-hungry data centers to devices at the edge, including laptops and mobile devices, where energy, size, and cost constraints are tighter. Its approach, known as analog in-memory computing, comes from research that CEO Naveen Verma spun out of his lab at Princeton University, where he’s still a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Verma wouldnt say who its customers are. But in addition to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which gave it $18.6 million last year, a whos who of industrial, electronics, and defense players are interested in EnCharges chips. The oversubscribed funding round, led by Tiger Global, includes the intelligence communitys investment unit In-Q-Tel, alongside the venture arms of defense giant RTX, power producer Constellation Energy, South Korea’s Samsung, and Taiwan’s Hon Hai (Foxconn). The Santa Clara, California-based startup is also working with semiconductor giant Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) to produce its first-generation chips.
The new investment brings EnCharge’s total funding to more than $144 million, and will help the 60-person company commercialize its technology, which isnt cheap in the world of semiconductors.
“Given the capital intensity of the semiconductor industry, the Series B is an important step for advancing commercialization” of its first chips, Verma tells Fast Company. He declined to disclose the company’s new valuation.
EnCharges push comes at a pivotal moment for the AI industry, which is grappling with the fast-growing energy and compute demands driven by a storm of generative AI. The advent of DeepSeek last month has brought new efficiencies and lower costs to AI model training and inference. (It’s unclear if more widespread use of DeepSeek-like models will cancel out those efficiency gains.) But DeepSeek is unlikely to stem the industry’s demand for more compute, more memory, and more energy.
EnCharge says that, for a wide range of AI use cases, its specialized chips, or accelerators, require up to 20 times less energy compared to today’s leading AI chips.
To make it work, the company relies on a high-wire technique. Rather than using only digital transistors to perform some of the multiplication operations at the heart of AI inferencethe continuous computations that produce chatbot outputsEnCharge’s chips exploit the non-binary wonders of the analog world.
“Analog computing isn’t new,” says Verma, “but EnCharge’s specific implementation and system-level approach address many of the fundamental issues that caused previous analog computing approaches to fail.”
Finding efficiencies in analog amid the noise
Memory access is computings biggest energy hog, and in AI, inference, rather than training, makes up the bulk of most models’ computations. Type a prompt and press enter, and the process of inference begins somewhere in the cloudwhich is to say in hulking data centers where giant clusters of hot, energy-intensive GPUs and CPUs demand massive amounts of electricity and water.
Along with the existing environmental costs, the energy required to train and run generative models on these chips is spiking demand on a stretched-thin energy grid. According to the International Energy Agency, a typical request to ChatGPT consumes 10 kilojoules, roughly ten times more than a typical Google search.
Memory’s energy demands also mean limits that could slow machine learning progress. Those include the way that, on a chip, the speed of computation is outpacing the bandwidth of memory and communication. Researchers call this problem the von Neumann bottleneck, or the memory wall.
EnCharges approach to the challenge is part of a decades-long quest to find efficiencies by placing memory circuits not next to, but inside a computing core, a technique called in-memory compute (IMC). Though it can be tricky to pull off, IMC promises speed-ups by bringing memory and logic closer together and making it far less computationally costly to access memory.
This is where the analog computing comes in. Whereas digital devices since the mid-twentieth century operate in a world of on or off, discrete 1s and 0s, analog devices exploit the in-between information of physical phenomenasuch as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantitieswhich allows them to store more data and operate at far lower energy than digital processors. (Quantum computers take the idea to another level, by exploiting the behavior of very, very tiny things.)
Because the states in analog devices may be, in the case of EnCharges chip, a continuum of charge levels in a tiny resistive wire, the difference between analog states can be smaller than those between 1 and 0. That requires less energy to switch between values. And that reduces the “data movement costs” between a chip’s memory and compute, says Verma.
But, like quantum, analog computing is notoriously noisy and difficult to scale. Verma says EnCharge addresses the accuracy and scalability problems using precise geometry control of its metal wire capacitors, static random-access memory (SRAM) to store the model weights, and a digital architecture that includes a software stack and a compiler to map applications to the chip.
“The result is a full-stack architecture that is orders-of-magnitude more energy efficient than currently available or soon-to-be-available leading digital AI chip solutions,” Verma say. “This includes all the digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversion overheads, which need to be designed in specialized and integrated ways with the in-memory-computing architecture.”
To reduce the costs involved in converting from digital to analog and back, the chip relies on a technique Verma calls “virtualized” IMC. “This involves performing computations directly within a first level of memory, but also by using a memory-system hierarchy, in an analogous way to virtualized memory systems, to enable the computations to efficiently scale to very large AI workloads and models. While traditional architectures face decreasing bandwidth and increasing latency as data size grows,” he wrote, “EnCharges virtualized IMC enhances latency and efficiency when accessing and computing on larger amounts of data,” making it efficient for both small and large language models.
Since Verma spun out the research in 2022, the company has been working with customers to refine and derisk its hardware and software designs. The current chipsdiscrete boards on PCIe cardscan run machine-learning algorithms at over 150 tera operations per second (TOPS) per watt, versus 24 TOPS per watt by an equivalent Nvidia chip performing an equivalent task. A newer process to trace finer chip features has allowed the company to triple its energy efficiency metric, to about 650 TOPS per watt.
The efficiency breakthrough of EnCharge AIs analog in-memory architecture can be transformative for defense and aerospace use cases where size, weight, and power constraints limit how AI is deployed today, said Dan Ateya, president and managing director of RTX Ventures. Continuing our collaboration with EnCharge AI will help enable AI advancements in environments that were previously inaccessible given the limitations of current processor technology.
Dozens of companies are developing new kinds of chips and other architecture to grapple with the energy and computing challenges of AI training and inference. Startups like Cerebras Systems, Samba Nova Systems, and Graphcore, acquired last year by Japans SoftBank, have sought to compete with Nvidia in the AI training market.
Cerebras, which sells its giant AI chips and offers services to customers through the cloud, filed paperwork in September to list its shares on the Nasdaq in an initial public offering. In its IPO prospectus, the company said it expects the AI computing market to grow from $131 billion in 2024 to $453 billion in 2027.
Other companies are also exploring in-memory analog computing, including startups Mythic, Neo Semiconductor, and Sagence. In a set of new papers, IBM Research scientists also demonstrated advances on analog in-memory computing, including research on a brain-inspired chip architecture for large models, as well as phase-change memory for smaller edge-sized models, and algorithm advances. Analog in-memory computing “could substantially improve the energy efficiency of LLMs by leveraging mixture of experts (MoEs) models,” according to one of the studies, which is featured on the January cover of the journal Nature Computational Science.
The Defense Department also continues to pursue analog computing. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) on Monday released a solicitation for a “digital engineering platform” to accelerate the design and validation of analog chips, as well as mixed-signal, photonic, and hybrid varieties.
[T]he design of these chips is often a bottleneck, with prolonged design cycles and high redesign rates, said the solicitation. Current manual design processes are time-consuming, iterative, and error-prone. Furthermore, the rising costs of prototyping and the shortage of skilled analog designers have created bottlenecks in the development pipeline. The DoD needs a way to accelerate the design process and reduce errors.
Russ Klein, the program director of Siemens EDA’s high-level synthesis division, told Semiconductor Engineering in December that if an analog IMC system like EnCharges can effectively scale, it could establish a new energy standard for inference and other high performance computing.
The energy savings of not having to move all that data and the parallelism that IMC promises will massively impact not just AI, but any computation that takes place on large arrays of data, he said.
In 2018, after imposing steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, Donald Trump famously tweeted, Trade wars are good, and easy to win. Trumps time out of the White House has not changed his mind on that subject. Since his inauguration last month, he has set about remaking American trade policy even more dramatically than he did in his first term.
Two weeks ago, he imposed across-the-board tariffs against Mexico, Canada, and China, and though he paused the tariffs on Mexico and Canada, theyre still scheduled to go into effect on March 4. This week, he once again imposed heavy tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (those will go into effect on March 12), and while in 2018 he had excluded imports from certain countries from the duties, this time around hes putting the steel and aluminum tariffs on imports from every country in the world. Finally, on Thursday, Trump rolled out a whole new set of import taxes, putting in place a system of reciprocal tariffswhatever the tariff a country imposes on U.S. imports of a product, the U.S. will now impose on imports of that product from that country.
These moves arent surprisingTrump loves few things the way he loves tariffs, and appears wholly unconcerned about the fact that tariffs raise prices for both U.S. businesses and U.S. consumers. (As he put it earlier this month, We may have, in the short term, a little pain, and people understand that.) But what is striking, though little-noticed, is that Trump has been able to impose these tariffs unilaterally. Not only has he not consulted with Congress, but he hasnt even had the office of the U.S. Trade Representative make a case for why the tariffs were necessary. In effect, hes raising taxes on imports because he feels like it.
Tariff loopholes
This isnt something the people who wrote the Constitution ever envisioned happening. In fact, the Constitution does not give the president the power to impose tariffs or make trade policy. Instead, it explicitly gives those powers to Congress alone, awarding it the authority to set duties and imposts (taxes on foreign goods) and to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations. But Trump isnt getting Congress to pass laws imposing these tariffs on foreign importshes doing it by executive order, acting entirely on his own.
How is Trump able to do this? By taking advantage of massive loopholes that Congress has created over the past 60 years, delegating much of its power over trade to the president, while taking very little care to limit what the president can do with that power. Trumps legal justification for his steel and aluminum tariffs, for instance, is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs as high as he wants on specific industries, as long as the Department of Commerce determines that imports in those industries are a threat to national security (a term the law does not define). He justified his across-the-board tariffs on Canada and Mexico by declaring illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling a national emergency, and then invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which gives him the power to impose tariffs during, yes, a national emergency.
As for his reciprocal-tariff scheme, Trump will likely rely on Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president, through the U.S. Trade Representative, to impose tariffs in response to any act, policy, or practice of a foreign country that the USTR finds is unjustifiable or unreasonable (terms the law, again, does not define).
A ‘national emergency’
The problem with all of these laws is that the language they use is so vague and ill-defined that they effectively enable the president to do pretty much whatever he wants whenever he wants. Trumps justifications for his policies are in many cases self-evidently ridiculous: Imports of steel from Canada or Australia, for instance, obviously do not threaten American national security, nor is the vanishingly small amount of fentanyl smuggled over the Canadian border every year a national emergency. But federal courts historically have been uninterested in overriding the presidents judgment about what constitutes a national-security threat, or an unjustifiable trade practice, and as a result have basically given the president free rein over trade policy.
That has not been a huge problem in the past because presidents have only rarely chosen to impose tariffs unilaterally. When George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs in 2002, for instance, it caused considerable controversy, simply because that kind of action was so unusual. And before Trump, the national security exemption for tariffs had been used primarily to ban oil imports from countries like Iran and Libya (which quite plausibly did pose a threat to national security). Even when presidents did invoke Section 301, it was typically used to negotiate trade settlements through the World Trade Organization.
Trump, though, loves tariffs more than any president in recent memory, and is no respecter of norms. So, he has happily exploited the loopholes Congress has left open, creating the situation of permanent uncertainty U.S. businesses and consumers find themselves in today, where we literally do not know if well wake up tomorrow to find a whole new round of import taxes imposed on the stuff we buy.
Congress could, of course, fix this problem overnight by simply repealing the laws that have outsourced so much responsibility over trade to the president. The Constitution puts trade policy in Congresss hands for a good reason: Imposing tariffs is almost never something that needs to be done urgently and, like all tax increases, it can and should be done legislatively.
Unfortunately, theres been no real support from either party in Congress for the idea of taking back power over trade from the White House. Last fall, Senator Rand Paul did offer a such a bill, one that would have required Congress to approve any tariffs the president wanted to impose. But it went nowhere. Now with Republicanswho, aside from the rare rebel like Paul, have no interest in challenging Trump on his pet issuein charge of both the Senate and the House, theres very little chance of Congress doing anything anytime soon. So we better get used to Trump Imposes New Tariffs headlines: There are going to be a lot of them over the next few years.
Jeff Bezos once said, “I like to wander.” That may seem counterintuitive in a business world obsessed with speed, but in a relentless pursuit of momentum, many leaders forget that speed without reflection leads to burnout, inefficiency, and poor decision-making.
A report by Asana revealed that nearly 70% of executives say burnout has affected their decision-making ability. The paradox is clear: The faster we try to move without reflection, the more we risk burnout, inefficiency, and short-sighted decision-making.
Leaders often mistake pausing for procrastination. However, the reality is that strategic pausing is a high-performance leadership move that separates reactionary decision-makers from visionary leaders. Its not about slowing down indefinitely; its about creating intentional space for recalibration so that when we do move forward, we do so with clarity, focus, and impact.
The high cost of constant acceleration
We live in an era where agility and rapid execution are prized above all else. But speed without strategy is like driving a high-performance car without brakes; eventually, you crash. Consider what happens when leaders dont pause:
Burnout skyrockets: More than 75% of employees experience burnout, and leaders arent immune. Urgency breeds exhaustion.
Decisions suffer: Without pauses, leaders react instead of strategizingleading to short-term fixes, not long-term solutions.
Innovation stalls: Breakthroughs dont come from busyness. They emerge from reflection, setbacks, and unexpected insights.
When leaders dont pause, they burn out, make poor decisions, and stifle innovation. But what if the very thing we fearslowing downis actually the secret weapon for sustainable success? Science backs this up.
The science behind slowing down
Neuroscience supports the idea that structured reflection enhances cognitive performance and decision-making. Harvard Business School research has shown that leaders who regularly engage in structured reflection improve their productivity and performance by 23%.
There are two critical ways slowing down improves leadership effectiveness:
It activates diffuse mode thinking. When we take breaks from active problem-solving, our brains process information in the background, leading to creative insights and better solutions.
It improves emotional intelligence. Leaders who pause before reacting better navigate difficult conversations, manage conflict, and lead with empathykey traits that drive engagement and retention.
Jeff Bezos famously introduced the “Day One” mindset at Amazon, a philosophy that ensures the company never becomes complacent. While Amazon is known for rapid execution, its leadership regularly pauses to reassess its strategic direction. Bezos would take time away from operations to think long-term, a practice that helped Amazon evolve from an online bookstore into a global tech giant.
I once worked with a biotech leader whose team was stuck in a cycle of continuous problem-solving, trying to rush a product to market. I encouraged them to step back and ask, “What are we missing?” That moment of intentional pausing led to a breakthrough that fundamentally changed the companys approach and resulted in a novel strategy no one had anticipated.
The ‘Slow down to speed up’ framework for leaders
How can leaders implement this strategy in their own organizations? Heres a practical framework:
Pause with purpose: Book a 30-minute “strategy pause” into your weekly calendar. Treat it like a non-negotiable meeting.
Ask better questions: Start your next leadership meeting with a single, high-quality question that shifts the teams thinking: What are we missing? Are we solving the right problem? Whats the long-term impact of this decision?
Create space for strategic thinking: Encourage teams to step away from constant execution. Googles 20% Time policy, which allows employees to spend a portion of their workweek exploring new ideas, has led to some of the companys most successful innovations, including Gmail and Google Maps.
Embrace rest as a performance strategy: Elite athletes know that recovery is as important as trainingthe same applies to leadership. Leaders who take intentional breaks return with sharper insights and renewed energy.
Foster a culture of reflection: Implement a 10-minute debrief ritual after major milestones to extract key lessons. Encourage teams to analyze what worked, what didnt, and what could be improved.
Sustainable success isnt about moving the fastest; its about moving with the greatest clarity. The leaders who make space for strategic pauses arent the ones who fall behindtheyre the ones who set the pace for everyone else. Before your next big decision, ask yourself: Am I moving fast just for the sake of moving? Or am I creating the space to move forward with clarity? The difference could define your leadership and your legacy.
ByteDances TikTok and CapCut apps are back in the Apple and Google app stores after having been absent from both for nearly a month. And in a sign of just how popular both apps are, both apps have rocketed up the App Store charts. Heres what you need to know about their returnand why you might want to download them again while you can.
TikTok quickly becomes most downloaded app
Yesterday evening, numerous ByteDance-owned apps unexpectedly returned to the Apple and Google app stores after being absent for nearly a month. This includes TikTok and the video editing app CapCut. Both were removed from Apples and Googles app stores on January 18, just hours before a U.S. ban on the distribution of ByteDances apps came into force on January 19.
Within hours of the apps’ return, they quickly shot to the top of Apples App Store charts. As of the time of this writing, TikTok is the No. 1 most downloaded app on the App Store, while ByteDances popular video editor, CapCut, which many TikTok creators rely on to edit their videos, is currently the fourth most downloaded app on the Apple App Store.
While both apps are also back on the Google Play store, neither are yet in the top 25 most downloaded free apps chart, according to data from SensorTower. A possible reason for TikToks absence from the Google Play chartsdespite its No. 1 position on Apples chartsmay be because Android users have been able to sideload the app on Android phones since last week.
Regardless, both TikTok’s and CapCut’s positions on Apples App Store charts exemplify just how popular the apps are with the general public despite the national security concerns the U.S. government harbors about them and parent company ByteDance.
Why are TikTok and CapCut back in the app stores?
When President Donald Trump returned to office, one of the first executive orders he signed was an order pausing the TikTok ban. Trump halted the banwhich came into effect the day before he took officeby 75 days in order to give his administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.
But while Trump paused the ban, ByteDances apps did not return to the Apple and Google app stores. One of the main reasons for this is that some legal experts were uncertain about whether or not Trumps administration actually had the power to pause the ban.
If it was found the administration did not, and Apple and Google had returned to hosting ByteDances apps on the platforms, both tech companies could have been liable for billions of dollars in fines under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the bill passed in April 2024 that authorized the ban.
So, whats changed? Apple and Google received a letter from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that assured the companies that the ban wouldnt be enforced immediately, according to a report from Bloomberg.
This letter was apparently enough for both tech companies to feel that they are no longer at risk of finesfor the time beingif they once again host the apps on their app stores.
You might want to download TikTok and CapCut soon
Its important to note that despite the assurances Apple and Google received, and despite TikTok and CapCut being once again available on the app stores, the TikTok ban has not gone away. Right now, its just paused.
That pause lasts until the first week in April. If a new deal acceptable to lawmakers and ByteDance is not reached by then, then the TikTok ban will go back into effect unless Congress repeals or alters the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
What this means is that, come early April, you may once again no longer be able to download TikTok, CapCut, and other ByteDance apps. So you might want to do it now while you still have the chanceunless, that is, you’re fine with dropping thousands of dollars on an eBayed smartphone.
Reflecting on her astronomic career rise, one of the leaders I coached once noted, I have always done better when my direct line manager was basically absentalternatively, they were mostly a barrier to my career advancement.
She is not alone.
At most companies, there are at least some managers who depend on their direct reports so muchnot least because they are actually doing their workthat they end up holding them hostage from moving up.
There are also plenty of examples where the same talented employees transition from enjoying star treatment and executive sponsorship to becoming the very target of their line managers, who feel threatened by and jealous of their success, which they are eager to block.
This goes beyond the anecdotal, as many scientific studies provide consistent evidence to explain why bosses are often the exact opposite of a champion, mentor, or sponsor to their direct reports, even when their sabotaging and boycotting goes undetected.
Reason 1: Your boss doesnt want to let go of a high-performing employee
As I found in my book The Talent Delusion, any manager who measures team productivity or collective output reliably will find that a vital few individuals in their team account for a disproportionately high chunk of the output. Just like its essential that they keep such individuals engaged, which may include giving them the star treatment, it is important that they retain them. But, ironically, being part of the vital few also makes you a high potential for the next career level and promotion, which will probably handicap their existing teams, and reduce the accomplishments of their existing manager.Unsurprisingly, research shows that one of the main reasons bosses become blockers of their reports career progression is their unwillingness to sacrifice or compromise their own team (and in turn individual) performance for the good of the employee or the organization.
Reason 2: Your boss is blocking your career advancement as a part of office politics
At times, career blocking may just be the product of wider organizational politics. For instance, even if your boss doesnt mind losing you despite the fact that they see you as one of the key members of their team, you may be hit by friendly fire if your boss is in a turf war with your potential new manager: think of it as your current and potential future boss fighting over an asset (you), not because they necessarily care about that asset, but because they are locking horns in a battle for power, influence, resources, and status. Its a bit like if you are leaving your husband or wife for someone elseusually a painful event for thembut that someone happens to be their nemesis or archenemyan unbearable provocation.
Reason 3: Your boss is waiting for retirement
Other times, managerial blocking may be due neither to fears of losing a star performer or vicious organizational politics, but simply due to existing retirement cycles, coupled with an unwillingness to distinguish between tenure and performance, not to mention potential. In other words, most people get stuck because their boss is waiting to retire, even if they have more or less retired from their current duties and role, albeit informally. As Max Planck, describing this in the context of academia, noted that science progressed one funeral at the time.
To be sure, many tenured and senior leaders (and employees) are among the top performers in an organization, so there are many arguments to keep them for a long time, even before they reach minimum retirement age. That said, they may still be blocking or delaying up-and-coming employees from gaining a well-deserved career progression, which may risk losing them to other organizations, including their competitors.
Reason 4: Your boss isnt willing to fight for you
Managers may not be deliberately blocking their employees career advancement, and yet passively contributing to their stagnation. As we know, identifying high-potential employees, which includes the selection of potential future leaders and executives in the most successful organizations in the world isnt a science, but a mix of science and intuition.The intuition part includes the politics of championing and sponsoring people, especially when they report to you. It may well be that your boss likes you, values you, and has no objection to your advancement; however, they may decide it’s not really necessary for them to fight the heated battle for having ones own team members promoted ahead of those of your peers.
While other bosses may actively campaign for their employees to be promoted, your boss may think that your achievements should speak for themselves, and that in a normal and rational culture, leaders should be able to make evidence-based decisions on career progression, rather than base it on popularity vote or who has the loudest and most powerful champion or sponsor. Sadly, your boss may be rightlogically and ethicallybut you will nonetheless lose out to some peers who are endorsed by politically active and powerful bosses.
Reason 5: Your boss is a narcissist
A final reason may be sheer narcissism, particularly vulnerable or insecure narcissism, which is not uncommon among bosses. Interestingly, narcissism may propel bosses to hire people who are just like themselves, and also designate them as successors: look at this brilliantly talented employee I brought into my team, they are amazingoh and they look much like myself.
However, when those very bosses feel a competitive threat from those employees, or that more attention is on them than on themselves, they may get defensive and decide to retaliate. Imagine, for example, a manager and a right-hand employee who in some ways resembleat least from a personality perspectiveDonald Trump and Elon Musk; regardless of what you make of their talents, you can see how such romances may be short-lived, and how the amazing highs may be followed by incredible lows.
Perhaps it is useful to remember that leadershipthe art of influencing others so they can collaborate effectively and form a high-performing teamis not just about impacting the people who formally report to you, but also your peers and bosses.
So, just like we would expect a good boss to avoid the traps discussed above, we would also expect talented and high potential employees to be astute and politically skilled enough to persuade their own bosses to let them go, especially when that is likely to contribute not just to their own personal career success, but also the success of the organization. Managing up, then, ought to include persuading your boss to not be a barrier.
Social media has a reputation for capturing ephemeral thoughts and images, but around the world, people are using Facebook for a different purpose, setting up groups to record and share images and memories of the past.
Facebook history groups and pages have popped up in major cities like New York and Seattle and in small towns and suburbs across the U.S. Other groups focus on the histories of hobbies and interests from ham radio to cooking to punk rock, but geographical groups in particular often collect unique information that may not be found anywhere else on the internet. Members share personal photos, family stories, and ephemera tied to places in their hometowns from former schools to businesses that have changed hands.
“There’ll be a corner store, and we have one name for it, and then people remember all of the owners over time,” says John Marks, curator of collections and exhibits at Historic Geneva, a museum in Geneva, New York, that operates a Facebook page with frequent historic discussions.
Historic Geneva frequently digitizes and posts photos from its collection of tens of thousands, and residents chime in with their own memories of bars, church groups, neighborhoods, and businesses, sometimes connecting with former neighbors in comment sections or following up with Historic Geneva to share details or artifacts with the museum.
“Say I post a picture of a factory that was here, and they say, ‘you know, my mom worked there, and I have X, Y and Z from that factory,'” Marks says. “I’ll reply to the post and say if you ever want to donate it, we’d love to have you give me a call.”
Marks says he typically spends a few hours a month preparing and scheduling posts, researching what the museum knows about particular images to caption them as best as possible. He’ll also try to record information Facebook users share about what he posts if it seems reliable, like the names of former owners of a business.
And while some history pages are run by professional historians or museum workers like Marks, many others are run by amateurs who essentially volunteer their time to moderate posts, removing spam and other unwanted content like political arguments from groups that in some cases have hundreds of thousands of members.
“It never stops,” says Mike McGinness, who founded a Florida history group that now has more than 300,000 members and 75,000 photos. “It’s a full-time job, just keeping the group civil, and keeping the group on track as to what our focus is.”
Photos posted in the group have helped old friends and even family members reconnect, he says, and well-captioned posts can be searched by users looking to find information about particular buildings or addresses. And about three years ago, McGinness and his co-admin Jeff Davies were contacted by publisher McIntyre Purcell, which led to a coffee table-style book of historic photos of Florida they’ve since promoted at bookstores, houses of worship, universities, and festivals up and down the Sunshine State.
“We’ve been, you know, promoting not even necessarily the book, but the Facebook group, and our brand of preserving Florida history,” says Davies. “It’s always good to sell a book, but it’s also good to preserve history, so 20, 30, or 40 years from now, if someone’s driving down the street anywhere in Florida and they look at a building, they could see what was there before.”
‘It’s really hard to get a hold of any support from Facebook’
Most Facebook history groups are probably run by inspired amateurs like McGinness and Davies, not professional historians, says Mark Tebeau, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the coauthor of the Handbook of Digital Public History. And they help connect members with historical memories and materials in a way that local historical societies and museums might struggle to do, since they have limited budgets and space to archive and exhibit community materials at scale.
The trouble is, Tebeau says, Facebook itself isn’t designed to be a historical archive. It’s not necessarily easy to browse or search material posted to Facebook groups, unless captions match search terms fairly precisely, and the lack of public APIs make it difficult for researchers to systematically access material stored on the site.
“These kinds of channels are not interested in these kinds of open internet practices that would be required for archivists like me to actually harvest and gather material from local communities,” Tebeau says.
Permissions and copyright issues can also make it difficult for professional historians to systematically archive or use material from Facebook, Tebeau says. It’s also not at all clear that Meta intends Facebook to be a long-term historical repository or what will become in the long run of one-of-a-kind photos and recollections shared exclusively on the site.
“I think people mistakenly think Facebook is forever, and it’s not,” he says.
Meta didn’t respond to inquiries from Fast Company. But it’s clear that moderators of history groups have challenges getting help from the company, as is common with services from Meta and other big tech companies.
“It’s really hard to get a hold of any support from Facebook,” McGinness says. “We’ve had quite a few glitches happen with our group, and we’ve tried to communicate with them, and it’s very difficult.”
He and Davies try to control who’s admitted to the group, weeding out obviously suspicious users with new accounts and no ties to Florida, and using moderation tools to flag posts with vulgarity and removing offenders, but McGinness says spammers do sometimes manage to slip into the group through means unknown. “Mike and I have spent hours and hours going through members, trying to remove the ones that have slipped in,” he says.
And at the same time, bogus Florida history groups have popped up, sometimes using photos taken without attribution from their group, which they post intermixed with spam, Davies says.
Other history groups and pages have struggled with cybersecurity issues, sometimes losing control of their groups to hackers. A Seattle group was hijacked last year, and, according to news reports, the administrators struggled to get the attention of Facebook or law enforcement until someone offered to connect them with a Meta employee, who was able to help restore access. The group admins didn’t respond to inquiries from Fast Company.
A Facebook page belonging to the Illinois State Historical Society, which has been active on the site for about 15 or 20 years, was similarly hacked last year, says executive director William Furry. The page had promoted historical content, events, and anniversaries from around the state, including promoting news from other historical societies in the state with limited resources for advertising. The historical society also saw some of its own content go viral, with plenty of comments from readers, including posts about the Radium Girls poisoned on the job in the early 20th century as they painted glow-in-the-dark clocks with the radioactive element.
But when the hackers took over, they shortened the page name, removing mention of Illinois, and started posting a flood of Star Wars trivia and memes.
“The good news is it wasn’t worse than that,” Furry says.
The hijacked page is now operated as Star Wars Society, albeit with a link to the historical society website and Furry’s email address still posted. And while the real historical society has since started a new page, it hasn’t regained a full complement of followers. There’s some stigma to being hacked, with followers potentially concerned they’ll be more vulnerable by association, Furry says. And the group never regained access to its old content, though Furry says he considered everything posted on the page to be “ephemeral” to begin with, serving a purpose of bringing historical information to those who see it.
“What I want to emphasize is that the problem for me is that there is no help from the Meta organization to stop this sort of thing,” he says. “It’s all on the victim for trying to resolve the problem, and there’s no effort on the part of Meta to go after the perpetrators.”
In general, even without security issues, Facebook history groups and pages tend, like other online forums, to rely on a degree of volunteer admin work that may not be obvious to casual visitors and posters.
“It’s a labor of love,” says Rebecca Heimbuck, who spends a couple of hours a day administering the group “Billings, Montana As She Was & Is.”
Heimbuck says she started the group partly to share her collection of historic postcards”you can sit and look at your own stuffwhat’s the fun in that?” she saysand partly to help dispel a notion that Billings is less historically interesting than other Montana cities. She made an effort to add detailed captions about the images she’d post, and she’s seen a steady stream of other people join to share their own memories and snapshots of Billings, adding more than 22,000 members in about three years.
“So, as long as there’s an interest and as long as people like it, I hope to keep it up as long as I can,” she says.
The Daytona 500 is one of the more challenging races on the NASCAR circuit. The speedway is long and narrow, forcing drivers to be more aggressive. And the weather in central Florida doesnt always cooperate. During the 2024 event, a deluge of rain had forced a Monday conclusion. After 41 lead changes and with only eight laps to go, a crash involving half the field prompted a red flag and a 15-minute delay. At the end, another collision between leader Ross Chastain and Austin Cindric opened the door for William Byron to zip by and take the checkered flag.
Byrons win wasnt a huge surprisehed notched 10 prior wins on the NASCAR circuitbut his backstory is unusual. Hes part of a new emerging generation of drivers who have learned much of the craft of high-speed racing online through iRacing, the premier esport for virtual, or sim, racing, where anyone can channel their inner Joey Logano and race in the glitziest virtual races in the world. Now 27, Byron became a NASCAR fan at the age of 6 when his father took him to a race in Virginia. A few years later, Byron heard an interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. gushing about sim racing and thats what got me interested, he says. I felt like I could learn something.
William Byron, driver of the #24 Axalta Chevrolet, celebrates in the victory lane after winning the NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 at the Daytona International Speedway on February 19, 2024 in Daytona Beach, Florida. [Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR]
iRacing at 12
Equipped with the necessary steering wheel, pedal, and a working PC, Byron began sim racing at age 12. He learned how to navigate tight turns, calculate angles, temper speedall without the worry of real-life crashing. Its realistic enough to get started and see if youre good at it, he says. Its really similar to pickup basketball. A chance for people to compete in a way they probably wouldnt have the opportunity to any other way. After a year and a half, Byron began to enter local go-kart races. Eighteen months after that, he was racing legend cars, launching his career.
Chelmsford, Massachusettsbased iRacing, cofounded by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry and motorsports simulator (and sometime racecar driver) Dave Kaemmer in 2008, is the biggest name in sim racing, with 150 employees and consistent double-digit annual growth. This past November, iRacing began collaborating with Microsoft to integrate AI technologies into its simulators.
In partnership with the Tiffany of racing brands, NASCARa deal that dates to the year of iRacings debutiRacing is changing the face of the sport: how up-and-coming drivers like Byron learn to drive, how cars are designed, how courses themselves are built, modified, and selected.
[Photo: iRacing]
Simulating excellence
Simulators have altered the landscape of athletics, especially in more finely skilled competitions such as baseball and golf. But virtual racing may be having the biggest impact. iRacings brand partnerships, not only with NASCAR but also some of the sports most storied racetracks and automakers, have allowed the company to re-create a real-world race experience down to the hubcaps. NASCAR and iRacing are also using the technology to figure out where (and even if) its feasible to build new tracks, or how to best modify existing ones, an arrangement that has led directly to races on the short track inside the L.A. Coliseum and the streets of downtown Chicago.
I think the iRacing partnership was a little bit ahead of its time, says Tim Clark, NASCARs executive vice president and chief brand officer. If you go back to the beginning, we probably didnt really know what to make of it. Was it a game? Entertainment? A training tool? And the answer is it was a little bit of all those things. Its so unique, because you could influence a NASCAR fan of tomorrow, you could influence a NASCAR driver of tomorrow. I make this joke all the time. the Dallas Cowboys arent looking for their next quarterback on Madden, but you can scout the next driver of a NASCAR national series on iRacing.
Chicago Street Course [Photo: iRacing]
NASCAR 25
Its like the experience of driving that race car in competition at any racetrack in the world, and gets you as close to reality without having to leave your home, adds iRacing executive director Dale Earnhardt Jr., a 2021 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee. The tracks are scanned to perfection. Every bump, crack, crevice in a unique character about that racetrack is included. Bonus: if you crash, no one ends up in a hospital.
iRacing currently boasts more than 1.2 million unique accounts and more than 300,000 active members. Now comes its next chapter: the launch this fall of NASCAR 25, an attempt to Madden-ize iRacings offerings and take sim racing from niche obsession to mass market behemoth. Its the companys very first console title. Up until now, iRacers had to pony up for a steering wheel and pedal set (which can run as high as $600), in addition to having to race solely on a PC.
Entering the console spacea landscape dominated by competitors like EA, Sony Interactive, and NintendoiRacing is betting that NASCAR 25 can deliver the verisimilitude of its online races via a console on a big screen TV, at a more consumer-friendly price point. While an annual membership in iRacing costs around $100, with additional fees if you want access to fancier cars and tracks, NASCAR 25 will allow drivers to start their engines on their trusty Xbox or PlayStation at a to-be-determined price point that should be similar to existing sports games. (Madden NFL 25 retails for $69.99.)
We want to make a NASCAR stock car drive like a real NASCAR stock car, says Steve Myers, the executive vice president of iRacing. Theres a reason only 40 guys in the world get to do itbecause its hard.
[Photo: iRacing]
From PC to console
iRacings biggest asset has been the realism of its racing experience. Diehard fans now wonder if the console version can match the original. Making the jump from the PC ecosystem to consoles is a big step, opening the door for more players to experience iRacings level or realism, says Alberto Segovia, an amateur driver and prolific blogger on sim racing. What intrigues me the most is how theyll manage to balance that authenticity with the accessibility of a console game. But if anyone can pull it off, its iRacing.
For NASCAR, Clark says, the game represents an effort to create fans on their terms. I think in years past, we may have taken a more selfish view of fandom, that you have to watch on TV or you have to buy a ticket and come to a racetrack. But if youre fandom is getting on iRacing and participating in some of these races that way, Im totally fine with that.
[Photo: iRacing]
A league of its own?
Therein lies other potential marketing gold to be mined, in the form of a televised TGL Golftype virtual racing league (NASCAR dipped a toe in during the COVID lockdowns), or even a celebrity-laden, Cannonball Runstyle special, with stars sliding into virtual race cars, ready to rev up. A lot will depend on just how much mass appeal NASCAR 25 can muster.
I want every fan of motorsport to be able to experience the anxiety of trying to qualify for race, the nerves and the butterflies of sitting on a starting grid before the engines fire, being in that nose-to-nose battle on the final lap, having to make that exact right decision in the right moment to win the race, Earnhardt says. Thats what they get to experience in iRacing. Theres no candy-coating, theres no handholding. Thats the draw.
Byron, who still sim races offseason to get the rust knocked off, is excited for the launch, and hell be right there at the starting line. He still sim races under his own name. Does he win all the time?
He laughs. Usually.
On January 29, President Donald Trump celebrated the latest victory in unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade against inefficiency in the government: stopping $50 million from, according to Trump, being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. Fact-checkers diplomatically pointed out that no evidence exists for this claim, which, if it were true, would work out to 1.5 billion condoms for some 2.1 million Gazans. They also noted that for several years, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides food, medical care, and humanitarian aid abroad, had not sent any condoms anywhere in the Middle East.
In a press conference on Tuesday, Musk appeared to concede that this might have been a mistake. (One theory: He got confused by the fact that the U.S. government funds disease prevention in Gaza Province, Mozambique.) But the condoms for Hamas story took on a life of its own on X, the social media platform Musk bought in 2022, where the outraged blue-check accounts that dominate feeds and replies treated it as incontrovertible proof of the righteousness of Mucks mission. Tip of the iceberg, Musk wrote on January 28, quoting an account called Autism Capital, which had shared a clip of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt making the condoms claim. As of this writing, the Autism Capital tweet has been viewed 54 million times; Musks retweet is not far behind, at 47 million.
In the weeks since, Musk has been working diligently to dismantle USAID, which he has described as a criminal organization that needs to die. Under his direction, the agency was gutted by a rapid-fire series of furloughs, firings, and spending freezes intended to reduce staffing by roughly 95%. Some smaller organizations that received USAID funding were forced to fold immediately; other luckier ones are scrambling to figure out what they will do if they exhaust their cash reserves sometime in the next few months.
A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of these orders from taking effect, but on Monday morning, staffers still found themselves locked out of their offices and were instructed to telework until further notice. In the meantime, USAID-funded soup kitchens in famine-stricken areas have already closed, and refugee hospitals are turning patients away; in Uganda, workers said that dozens of newborns were contracting HIV daily after funding for antiretroviral drugs disappeared. Even if some federal judge eventually rescues USAID from Musks clammy grasp, people will suffer and die because Trump turned the government over to a Big Tech reactionary who believes that money spent on poor people is money wasted.
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, Musk tweeted on the evening of Sunday, February 2. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.
Musks war on USAID is the fullest realization yet of his efforts to turn X into a Musk-inflected agitprop factory. By replacing the legacy Twitter verification system with one that makes algorithmic boosts freely available for purchase, Musk created an environment in which anyone with a paid account can turn their favorite conspiracy theory into a trending topic. When Musk, as he so often does, weighs in on a post that catches his attention, his cosign amplifies it to his more than 200 million followers, who read, digest, and repeat it to the point where it might work its way to the top of the trending-topics page again. It is an unprecedented level of being Too Online: Musk is both driven by news cycles on X and driving news cycles on X all by himself.
Before the election, the byproduct of this dynamic was typically just an unfunny tweet with the cry-laughing emoji appended. Now, with Trump in the White House and apparently happy to serve out his term getting puppeteered by the worlds richest man, the stakes are considerably higher: If a stupid viral tweet about condoms sufficiently piques his interest, Musk has the power to ruin lives overnight.
As the Washington Post reports, Musks obsession with USAID appears to originate from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who, prior to his stints in government, seems to have moonlit as a pseudonymous alt-right streamer warning of the looming dangers of white genocide. Benzs thesis, as outlined in a blizzard of color-coded tweets and hours-long videos that make the Pepe Silvia guy look like the paragon of rational thinking, is that USAID is a front group for American intelligence involved in mass censorship, leftist indoctrination, and/or clandestine anti-Trump machinations executed by shadowy figures at the highest levels of government.
Most of Musks anti-USAID tweets in recent weeks, according to NBC News, are interactions with Benz and other blue-check X accounts pushing the same narrative. (Among them: a clip from Benzs December appearance on Joe Rogans podcast.) Musks triumphant wood chipper tweet, for example, quoted a tweet from Benz that called USAID the Terror Titanic, which in turn quoted a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos that described USAID as the most gigantic global terror organization in history.
There is a simple moral argument for one of the worlds wealthiest countries spending a fraction of its annual budget to fight starvation and epidemic and poverty abroad, especially when its annual military spendingthe same military that drops bombs on other countries whenever U.S. politicians deem that particular form of intervention more usefulis more than $800 billion, or roughly 20 times the $40 billion budget of USAID. But you do not have to buy this argument to understand how USAIDs work benefits the economy, or national security, or whatever else you might include in a term as nebulous as American interests. The reason Congress created and continues to fund USAID is to strategically build soft power and goodwill; that this often takes the form of providing badly needed (and relatively inexpensive) humanitarian aid is mostly a happy coincidence. When a country is still struggling to address, say, chronic food shortages or an antibiotic-resistant strain of tuberculosis, planning ambitious new ventures with U.S. businesses probably wont be at the tippy-top of its priority list.
Musks purported interest in government efficiency has always been about accumulating power, and his decision to single out USAID is unsubtle even by his standards. He is implementing a farcically literal version of America First, eager to cut off people whose lives, in his opinion, are not worth the trouble of improving, let alone saving from preventable death.
In some ways, the Musk-USAID odyssey follows a familiar pattern: conspiracy theories bubbling up from the murkiest depths of the right-wing media ecosystem, which tweaks, launders, and repackages stories to the point where they’re coherent enough for the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, the front page of Drudge, and/or the A-block on Fox & Friends. During the first Trump administration, there was no better way to track the presidents official position on pretty much any issue of substance by reviewing whatever Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt had spent the morning gabbing about.
Eight years later, however, stories no longer need to appear in a Murdoch-owned media property to rocket to the top of the White House agenda. If you are a conservative activist who wants to influence the trajectory of American politicsor, for that matter, if you are a member of a foreign intelligence agency looking to do the samethe single smartest investment you can make is a monthly subscription for an X account that earns a coveted Wow! reply from Musk. Or, even better, Looking into this.
The proliferation of fringe views on X aligns nicely with Musks policy preferences. But it is also good for the long-term viability of the X platform, which Musk frames as a tool for citizen journalists to report on stories that the traditional news media fails to cover accurately, thoroughly, or both. Musk often exhorts X users to remember they are the media now”and of the four X accounts NBC News identifies as peddling anti-USAID content boosted by Musk, one promises unfiltered breaking news, and another claims to be a citizen journalist. Omitted from Musks rhetoric is the simple fact that X does not subject content to a meaningful vetting process; in practice, citizenship journalism is a euphemism for empowering anyone to label anything as news and trust the algorithm to make it so, no matter how disconnected from reality it may be.
When Musk calls X the future of journalism, he isnt saying he wants people on X to report on the shuttering of USAID or the deaths of the people it serves. He wants people on X to drown out the journalists who report these things. For people steeped in the closed, pay-to-play universe hes built, whatever is happening on X is the story. If it isnt happening on X, is it even happening in the first place?
Nobodys going to bat a thousand, Musk said in his White House press conference after a reporter asked about the condom falsehood. We will make mistakes, but well act quickly to correct any mistakes. Shortly thereafter, he tweeted a clip of himself speaking at the press conference, along with the caption, $50M of condoms is a LOT of condoms. It has 59 million views and counting.
Though only a few weeks old, already the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is radically changing the face of bureaucracy in D.C. The Elon Musk-led agency has slashed government spending, gained full access to the Treasury Departments payments systems, and pushed federal employees to resign.
While Democrats and union groups have raised concerns about the effect on the American people, DOGE and Musk appear to have President Trumps full support. Hes a big businessman. Hes a successful guy. Thats why we want him doing this, Trump said in a press conference on Tuesday, emphasizing that DOGE has a lot of work, a lot of smart people involved.
So, who are these “smart people,” whos actually behind the organizational shake-up in Washington? Heres everything you need to know so far about the DOGE staffers.
Jennifer Balajadia, 36
Balajadia worked as an operations coordinator for the Boring Company, founded in 2016 by Elon Musk, for almost eight years. According to the New York Times, she is an official member of DOGE, traveling with Musk and helping him with scheduling and daily tasks.
Alexandra T. Beynon, 36
Beynon was the head of engineering for her husband, Dylan’s, startup, Mindbloom, a guided at-home ketamine-therapy company. She previously worked for Symphony.com as a director in engineering and at Goldman Sachs as a software developer. According to ProPublica, when asked about her role in the new administration and DOGE, she said, I have no idea what you are talking about.
Nicole Hollander, 42
Hollander is working at the General Services Administration. She previously worked at X, where she handled the companys real estate. Before that, she worked at JBG Smith, a commercial real estate and real estate investment trust company, as senior vice president of retail asset management. Hollander is married to Steve Davis, a longtime associate of Musk’s.
Kendall M. Lindemann, 24
Lindemann is a member of the DOGE team, according to ProPublica. She worked as a venture associate for Russell Street Ventures, a healthcare firm, founded by another DOGE associate, Brad Smith. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, she worked as a business analyst for McKinsey & Company.
Adam Ramada, 35
Ramada worked as comanaging partner of Spring Tide Capital, a venture capital company. Spring Tide previously invested in Impulse Space, founded by Tom Mueller, a founding member of SpaceX. According to E&E News, Ramada identified himself as an employee of DOGE in court documents involving a union fight against DOGE’s access to sensitive government information. E&E News, acquired by Politico in 2020, stated that he reportedly appeared in the Energy Department and GSA.
Ryan Riedel, 37
Riedel worked as a lead network security engineer at SpaceX before becoming chief information officer at the Department of Energy (DOE). His new position was confirmed in a LinkedIn post by Ann Dunkin, former CIO of DOE, on February 9. Riedel previously served in the U.S Army Cyber Command as a network manager.
Kyle Schutt, 37
Schutt is a DOGE software engineer working at the GSA. He was previously chief technology officer at Revv, an online donation platform. Before deleting his LinkedIn profile, Schutt wrote that he led the development and launch of WinRed, the Republican Partys major online fundraising program, which according to its website, raised $1.8 billion for Republicans in the 2024 election.
Edward Coristine, 19
Coristine, a first-year student at Northeastern University in Boston, spent three months last summer at Neuralink, Musks brain-computer interface company, according to his résumé, which was obtained by Wired. He is part of the young group of DOGE staffers detailed to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). According to internal records reviewed by Wired, Coristine is listed as an expert at OPM.
Akash Bobba, 21
Bobba was listed in Wired magazine as another one of the six young engineers picked for Musks DOGE team. He recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He was an intern at Meta and at Palantir, the software and data analytics firm that’s a defense contractor. Bobba has reportedly been able to access internal databases as an expert at OPM.
Ethan Shaotran, 22
Shaotran is a member of the DOGE team, according to ProPublica. He recently attended Harvard University where he studied computer science. His LinkedIn account has since been deleted. When he was a student, he received a $100,000 grant from OpenAI to develop an AI scheduling assistant called Spark. He was a finalist in a hackathon organized by Musks AI company, xAI. According to Wired, Shaotran is one of six guys under age 24, who are now playing a critical role in DOGE, tasked with modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.
Luke Farritor, 23
Farritor works as an executive engineer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to ProPublica. He studied computer science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, dropping out before his final semester, and interned at SpaceX, working on its Starlink Wi-Fi team, according to his LinkedIn profile. In March 2024, he received a Thiel fellowship, a two-year program founded by billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel that awards a $100,000 startup rant to students who drop out of college.
Gautier Cole Killian, 24
Killin has a working email associated with DOGE, where he is listed as a volunteer, according to Wired. ProPublica reported that he works at the EPA as a federal detail, which typically allows government employees to transfer between agencies. He worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, which specializes in algorithmic financial trades, and which was stated on an archived version of his now-deleted personal website.
Gavin Kliger, 25
Kliger is a special advisor at OPM, according to ProPublica. He is listed in internal records reviewed by Wired as a special advisor to the director for information technology. Kliger spent around five years as a software engineer at Databricks, an AI company.
Jordan M. Wick, 28
Wick is a member of the DOGE team, and a recent graduate from MIT, where he studied computer science, according to ProPublica. He was a software engineer at Waymo, where he worked on self-driving cars. He was listed as a cofounder and CTO of Intercept, which is affiliated with California-based tech incubator Y Combinator.
Nate Cavanaugh, 28
Cavanaugh is an entrepreneur who cofounded two companies, Brainbase and FlowFi. Brainbase is an intellectual property management firm that was acquired by Constellation Software in 2022. FlowFi is an accounting and finance platform for small businesses. He has been interviewing staffers at the GSA as part of the DOGE team, according to ProPublica.
Jacob Altik, 32
Altik is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. He previously clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Judge Joan L. Larsen and United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee. Last year, he was selected to begin a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
James Burnham, 41
Burnham is a former litigation partner at Jones Day and a high-ranking Justice Department and White House official from the first Trump administration. According to his former employers website, Burnham was a senior associate counsel to President Trump and played a critical role in the selection and confirmation processes for Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett. ProPublica reported that his title at DOGE is listed internally as general counsel.
Keenan D. Kmiec, 45
Kmiec worked in elite law before transitioning to crypto. According to his LinkedIn, he clerked on the Supreme Court for Chief Justice John Roberts in the 2006-2007 term and then worked at a corporate law firm. He was a partner in a small law firm focused on insider-trading litigation. Kmiec then worked for the Tezos Foundation, tasked with legal project management and other tasks across a cryptocurrency ecosystem, according to his LinkedIn. After that, he served as CEO of a now-defunct startup called InterPop.
Anthony Armstrong, 57
Armstrong is a technology banker at Morgan Stanley who worked on Musks $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, now X. He now has a role in the OPM, which handles personnel issues across the federal government. Under the Trump administration, OPM recently directed agencies to submit names of every employee who had underperformed in the past three years and note if any have been on “performance plans.”
Riccardo Biasini, 39
Biasini is an engineer and former executive who worked at two of Musks companies, the Boring Company and Tesla. He now has taken a high-ranking role in OPM, reported ProPublica. Biasini was listed as the person of contact for the government-wide email system used to send messages directly from OPM to millions of federal employees across the government, according to a recent document.
Brian Bjelde, 44
Bjelde has worked for SpaceX for more than 20 years, currently the vice president of people operations. Previously, he was an associate engineer at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was referred to in press reports as a top DOGE Lieutenant, working at OPM to slash head count.
Steve Davis, 45
Davis worked at SpaceX, X, and the Boring Company, as a senior executive and close associate of Musk’s for more than two decades. He was one of the first people to be associated with DOGE. The New York Times reported that he was on early calls with Musk as they explored ways to cut federal programs.
Marko Elez, 25
Elez works at the Treasury Department, according to ProPublica. He graduated from Rutgers in 2021, where he studied computer science. He has reportedly gained access to highly sensitive payment systems of the Treasury Department, according to Wired. But Elez allegedly resigned February 6 after the Wall Street Journal reported that he has links to a social media account that posted racist comments online. Musk said publicly he planned to rehire the engineer.
Stephanie Holmes, 43
Holmes runs human resources at DOGE, according to ProPublica. She is a former lawyer with Jones Day, which frequently represented Trump. Holmes also ran her own HR consulting firm, BrighterSideHR, which advised companies to pursue non-woke approaches to DEI, according to 404 Media.
Tom Krause, 47
Krause leads a team who have been granted read-only access to the code for the agencys Fiscal Service payment system, which processes payments for programs such as Social Security and Medicare, according to the Treasury Department. The New York Times reported that Krause is affiliated with Musks DOGE team. He previously worked as CEO of Cloud Software Group, which provides enterprise software.
Katie Miller, 33
In December, Trump named Miller, who served in the first administration as a press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence, as one of the first members of DOGE. She is married to White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.
Justin Monroe, 36
Monroe is working as an advisor in the office of the director of the FBI, according to ProPublica. He is a seasoned information security professional who served in the U.S. Navy as an information warfare officer. According to NBC News, an unnamed SpaceX employee had been placed in the FBI directors office, but no name was confirmed.
Nikhil Rajpal, 30
Rajpal is listed as an expert” for OPM. He is representing DOGE in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to Wired. Rajpal’s online presence has since been deleted, but Wired reported he studied computer science at UC Berkeley and worked at Twitter before Musks acquisition.
Rachel Riley, 33
Riley works as senior advisor at HHS, according to ProPublica. She previously was a partner for the consultancy firm, McKinsey & Company. Riley has worked closely with Brad Smith, a former health official in Trumps previous administration who ran DOGE during the transition period, as stated in the New York Times.
Michael Russo, 67
Russo is a high-ranking technology official at the Social Security Administration (SSA), as reported by ProPublica. Russo spent more than seven years as an executive and senior advisor with Shift4 Payments, which is an investor in SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn. Russos office will oversee the SSAs more than $2 billion IT budget.
Amanda Scales, 34
Scales worked in the human resources department at xAI, Musks artificial intelligence company. She was listed as the point of contact for questions after a memo was sent to federal employees, putting them on notice that DEI and accessibility initiatives in the federal government were now barred through an executive order. Scales is now chief of staff at OPM.
Thomas Shedd, 28
Shedd, a mechanical engineer, worked at Tesla, building software that operated vehicle and battery factories. He now is the Federal Acquisition Service deputy commissioner and runs the Technology Transformation Services, according to a GSA press release.
Brad Smith, 42
Smith served in a series of health-related policy roles during the first Trump administration, including being part of the board on the COVID-19 vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed. The New York Times reported that he was helping to lead DOGE.
Christopher Stanley, 33
Stanley is an experienced information security professional who has worked at multiple Musk-related companies, including SpaceX and X. He is reportedly an aide to Musk at DOGE, according to the New York Times, and has a role at the White House.
