Luke Farritor

Bloomberg Businessweek’s long article of July 2025 states that he grew up in Lincoln, NebraskaNebraskaNebraska is a state of the United States bordered by South Dakota to the north, Iowa and Missouri to the east, Kansas to the south, and Colorado to the southwest, with its panhandle bordering Wyoming to the west; its capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha. It was admitted to the Union on March 1, 1867, as the 37th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 1,961,504.Open the full entry, was homeschooled and called himself “lukethecoder64” online, and is the eldest of four children; he was a bell ringer at church, played the piano, golf, chess and the video game Kerbal Space Program, and counted the novel The Martian among his favorite books.⁠[1]

Scientific American wrote in October 2023 that he had always been interested in history and had taught himself Latin as a child. The Flatwater Free Press wrote in February 2025 that his uncle, Pat Farritor, remembers him designing apps in the third or fourth grade.⁠[2][3]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that he enrolled at Lincoln Southeast High School so that he could play on its golf team; a photo caption in the article says that he took enough classes to play for the school’s varsity golf team in 2019 and 2020, and the 2020 season was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.⁠[3]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that, as his website described it, he helped build MyLink while still in high school, an app that connects Nebraskans with vital services; Bloomberg Businessweek writes that during his high school summers he helped build an app that could link those in need to local charities, and that it is still in use.⁠[3][1]

In the fall of 2020 he was one of 41 computer science students accepted to the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; Bloomberg Businessweek writes that he belonged to the school’s Cohort 2020.⁠[3][1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that he was uncommonly talented but, some classmates say, did not always invest himself in group projects, and that he skipped classes to work on the music project and on the scrolls; one classmate said: “School was never a priority for Luke, and that was well understood.” The Flatwater Free Press writes that classmates described him as quiet, friendly when he was not lost in his own curiosity, hardworking and not given to bragging, while some felt that he might be in over his head, and that he missed the Raikes School’s Business Law and Ethics class, which covers privacy, the risks of complex systems and related responsibilities, because he was working for SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry.⁠[1][3]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that one classmate said his dorm room “was full of little wires, computer chip boards, mini embedded system computers, things in boxes,” and that another calls him “cracked,” which the magazine describes as a compliment among coders. The Flatwater Free Press writes that in a video made by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln he said: “The Raikes School, and just the University of Nebraska as a whole, has provided a great educational background.”⁠[1][3]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that after his freshman year he interned at John DeereDeere & CompanyDeere & Company, known by its John Deere brand, is an American maker of agricultural, turf, construction and forestry equipment that also provides financial services; it has manufactured agricultural equipment since 1837 and is headquartered in Moline, Illinois.Open the full entry, and that the following summer he interned at StarlinkStarlinkStarlink is a satellite broadband service supporting video calls, streaming and communications in remote locations.Open the full entry, SpaceX’s satellite constellation.⁠[3]

TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry writes that he interned at Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet company, in mid-2022, and that he worked at SpaceX from May 2022 to July 2023 on several “mission-critical projects” leading up to Starship Flights 1 and 2, a description the site credits to his website. Fast Company writes that his LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry profile showed him working on Starlink’s Wi-Fi team.⁠[4][5]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that from January to July 2023 he worked on Starship, the SpaceX team overseeing a reusable rocket ship. Bloomberg Businessweek writes that he arrived at SpaceX’s Starbase in TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry in January 2023, was assigned to the launchpad software team and spent seven months there as an intern; he said that he had found a fuel leak on the pad a few weeks before the April launch, “which was a really big deal.”⁠[3][1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that one morning in March, while driving to Starbase, he heard Nat Friedman, the former chief executive of GitHub, describe the Vesuvius Challenge on a podcast, and so joined the effort to read the Herculaneum scrolls charred by Mount Vesuvius with artificial intelligence.⁠[1]

UKNow of the University of Kentucky writes that Brent Seales, a professor of computer science there, developed Volume Cartographer, the virtual unwrapping software, and in March 2023 launched the contest in partnership with EduceLab, the library of the Institut de France and the founders of the Vesuvius Challenge; the prize money, originally $200,000, grew to $1 million in total through contributions of $5,000 to $450,000 from more than 30 individuals.⁠[6]

Scientific American writes that he joined the challenge early, when some 1,500 teams were collaborating on Discord, and that after a competitor noticed in late June a visible texture later called “crackle,” he concentrated on it as a clue to letters. The Vesuvius Challenge announcement states that he started from the “crackle” pattern found by Casey Handmer, spent his evenings and late nights training a machine-learning model on that pattern, and found a few dozen ink strokes and some complete letters that were labeled and used as training data; with each new crackle found the model improved and revealed more crackle in the scroll.⁠[2][7]

Smithsonian Magazine writes that Casey Handmer won $10,000 in August for finding evidence of ink inside the unopened scrolls, and that the Vesuvius Challenge said Casey Handmer’s insights led directly to his discovery.⁠[8]

Scientific American writes that one evening in August, while at a party, he got an alert that a new segment with strong crackle had been released and ran his algorithm on it from his phone; about an hour later, on his walk home, he saw five letters on the screen. He said he was “jumping up and down,” realizing that the approach was “actually going to work.” It then took only a few days to refine the model and find the ten letters needed for the prize.⁠[2]

Smithsonian Magazine writes that in the challenge’s video announcement he recalled that when he realized his method had worked he “saw these letters” and “completely freaked out,” almost falling over and almost crying.⁠[8]

The Vesuvius Challenge announcement states that in August 2023 he became the first person to see an entire word inside an unopened scroll; his first submission faintly showed the Greek ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ (porphyras, “purple”), a word that papyrologists found to be rare in ancient texts. Scientific American writes that the word had not yet been found in the opened scrolls. UKNow writes that he and Youssef Nader independently found the same Greek word, whose meaning it gives as “purple dye” or “clothes of purple,” in the same area of the scroll; he said: “I didn’t expect any substantial results.”⁠[7][2][6]

On October 12, 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge announced, under the headline “First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student,” that he had won the $40,000 First Letters Prize, which required at least 10 letters within an area of 4 square centimeters. The announcement describes him as a college student and SpaceX summer intern at Starbase; a panel of papyrologists independently and unanimously annotated 13 letters, with varying confidence.⁠[7]

The announcement states that Youssef Nader, an Egyptian graduate student in biorobotics in Berlin, independently found the same word in the same area with clearer results and won second place and $10,000, and that Casey Handmer, a former JPL startup founder, was the first to find convincing evidence of ink inside the unopened scrolls and received the $10,000 First Ink Prize.⁠[7]

Scientific American writes that he was then 21 and a computer science student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, that he trained a neural network on tiny differences in surface texture to make the ink visible, and that he had since run his models on other segments and was seeing more characters appear. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples and a member of the academic committee that reviewed his findings, said that she was shocked when she saw the first image, adding, “It was such a dream”; she considered the reading of any text at all more important than the single word, since it could eventually reveal a scroll’s title and author.⁠[2]

On November 8, 2023, the School of Computing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln announced that Luke Farritor, a computer science student, had been named a winner of the Vesuvius Challenge and had been featured by the local television station 10/11 News.⁠[9]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in January 2024, during winter break, he spoke with the magazine from his parents’ basement in Lincoln, already knowing that his team had won the Grand Prize of the Vesuvius Challenge; he said: “People are going to write WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is a free, multilingual online encyclopedia launched on January 15, 2001, written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation; it is one of the most visited websites in the world.Open the full entry pages about this.” Of his trips to Silicon Valley he said: “What’s cool is I go there, and all these people care about me.”⁠[1]

The magazine writes that he also knew then that he had won a grant from Tyler CowenTyler CowenTyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University and chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center; in 2003 he co-founded the economics blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, he has written books including The Great Stagnation and Stubborn Attachments, and he hosts the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2021.Open the full entry’s Emergent Ventures, which he would use to travel to Europe, where one of his sisters would join him, and that he was leaving school and moving to Palo Alto, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry; he posted on X: “About to fly to Europe. I hope they have Diet Coke.”⁠[1]

On February 5, 2024, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that its $700,000 Grand Prize for 2023 had been awarded to a team of three: Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger. The announcement describes him as a 21-year-old college student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, Youssef Nader as an Egyptian PhD student in Berlin, and Julian Schilliger as a Swiss robotics student at ETH Zürich who had won three Segmentation Tooling prizes and built the auto-segmentation tool ThaumatoAnakalyptor. UKNow writes that the team, led by Youssef Nader, split the prize for revealing 15 partial columns of hidden text in PHerc.Paris4, a scroll owned by the Institut de France.⁠[10][6]

The announcement states that the team unwrapped and read about 5% of the scroll: the submission met the prize criteria of four passages of 140 characters each, at least 85% recoverable, and added 11 more columns, for more than 2,000 characters in all. The text appears to concern pleasure, a central question of Epicurean philosophy, and discusses whether goods such as food give more pleasure when scarce or when abundant; Philodemus, the announcement says, is thought to have been the villa’s philosopher-in-residence, but the authorship of this text is not confirmed. Nebraska Today writes that the organizers had estimated the odds of anyone reaching the four-passage threshold at less than 30%, and that the text appears to have gone unread since A.D. 79.⁠[10][11]

Nebraska Today of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln describes him as a senior at the university, a Lincoln native and a student of the Raikes School, and writes that he developed and trained a machine-learning model that detects the faint differences in texture that suggest ink. He said: “It is the privilege of a lifetime to be a small part of this,” and: “We are celebrating right now, but there’s no reason to slow down.” The article states that he planned to keep improving the models and hoped that his work could help double the amount of readable Greco-Roman text.⁠[11]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that, as he said to the university’s alumni magazine, he used his Vesuvius Challenge winnings to buy ballet shoes for his sister, a poster for his brother and meals at a Mediterranean restaurant near campus for himself; he also bought and rented some more powerful computers.⁠[3]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in March 2024 he was at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles for the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize ceremony; work on the scrolls was to continue and all three winners were offered positions with the project, which he declined.⁠[1]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship. He was 13th on the list, which gives his hometown as Lincoln, Nebraska, and his project as The Vesuvius Challenge, which, the announcement says, “is accelerating the reading of the Herculaneum Papyri, the last surviving library of the Roman Empire.” Each fellow received $100,000 and access to a network of technology founders, investors, scientists and former fellows; the class joined 270 previous fellows.⁠[12][13][4]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that the 20 fellows of the class were 19 men and one woman, who had to give up on college and, as one fellow put it, “be great.” Fast Company describes the Thiel Fellowship as a two-year program founded by the billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry that awards a $100,000 startup grant to students who drop out of college; CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry calls Peter Thiel a billionaire tech founder and Musk associate.⁠[1][5][13]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that, as the university stated, he dropped out of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in the spring of 2024, and that, as classmates described it, he accepted a fellowship with Peter Thiel, whom it calls a venture capitalist and conservative activist, and moved to California. Fast Company writes that he dropped out before his final semester. Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in November of his senior year he let his senior project group know that he would likely drop out before the project was complete, and that in early March 2024 he gave an exit interview to the University of Nebraska student paper; Steve Cooper, the executive director of the Raikes School, said that he could not talk about him because of university rules, and the article quotes Raikes as saying: “Luke is a great talent. I wish he was still here.”⁠[3][5][1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that after becoming a Thiel Fellow he worked for Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross at their venture fund, NFDG; in the spring of 2024 he spent many of his days at the NFDG office in Palo Alto researching potential emerging technologies in the space industry, and that summer and fall he got involved with AI Grant, the program the two had created, which awarded startup founders not money but mentorship and cloud computing credits; during what were called “founder days” he sat to the side, taking notes as entrepreneurs practiced their pitches.⁠[1]

TechCrunch writes that an archived copy of his website says he worked for Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, helping them invest a large multistage venture fund and run AI Grant; neither Nat Friedman nor Daniel Gross responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment. The Flatwater Free Press writes that he wiped his site sometime before January 19, 2025.⁠[4][3]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that he attended his first Berkshire HathawayBerkshire HathawayBerkshire Hathaway Inc. is a multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States (NYSE: BRK.A/BRK.B), with businesses spanning insurance, railroads, energy, manufacturing, and retail. Warren Buffett took control of the company in 1965 and ran it until 2025, and Greg Abel succeeded him as CEO at the start of 2026. The company long held stakes in several U.S. banks, including M&T (1991–2020), Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, which it successively reduced or exited between 2020 and 2024.Open the full entry annual meeting in Omaha to see Warren BuffettWarren BuffettWarren Buffett is an American investor who took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and served as its chairman and chief executive from 1970; he handed the chief executive role to Greg Abel on January 1, 2026 and became chairman emeritus, while remaining a director, on September 18, 2026.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in November 2024 he sent his résumé, with a one-line note, to the United States Digital Service; in the days before Thanksgiving he returned to Lincoln to accept an award from the Heartland Robotics Cluster and spoke about his work on the scrolls, and he had not spoken publicly in his hometown since then by the time the article appeared.⁠[1]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2024, during an online chess chat, he let his friends know that he might get a job with Elon Musk. Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in early December 2024 he said on a Discord call with friends: “Guys, you can’t talk about this, but I’m actually going to be a part of DOGE.”⁠[3][1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that on January 2, 2025, he posted in the Thiel Fellows’ WhatsApp group: “DOGE is urgently looking for operations and software engineers to help cut 2 trillion from the national spend.” Thirteen of the other 19 fellows of his class responded with heart and dog-face emojis.⁠[1]

The magazine writes that on January 11 he reposted a comment by Elon Musk on X, “Incompetence in the limit is indistinguishable from sabotage,” and that he had not posted on X since then by the time the article appeared.⁠[1]

A memorandum opinion of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia dated March 31, 2026, states that he, a recent hire of the General Services Administration (GSA), accepted a detail to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on January 21, 2025, and was also detailed to USDS and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB); in a footnote the opinion says that he may have been detailed to or employed at other agencies too, but that HHS has so far refused to disclose this.⁠[14]

The opinion states that HHS follows the principle of least privilege and grants system access only to users who need the information for their official duties and hold security level VI clearance or higher; on his second day as an HHS detailee HHS gave him administrator access to his first agency system containing personally identifiable information, the Payment Management System, and over the following weeks access to eight other systems containing personally identifiable or protected health information, two of which he accessed: the HHS Consolidated Acquisition Solution (HCAS) and NIH’s electronic research administration system, eRA. On January 29, 2025, HHS granted him access to HCAS, a contract writing system.⁠[14]

Fast Company wrote on February 14, 2025, that he was working as an executive engineer at HHS, noting ProPublicaProPublicaProPublica is an independent, nonprofit investigative newsroom based in New York, announced in October 2007 and operating from 2008, whose stated mission is to expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust; it had won nine Pulitzer Prizes by 2026.Open the full entry as the origin of this information. Bloomberg Businessweek writes that he could get into systems used for payment management, grants and health-care accounting, as well as grants.gov and two contracting systems of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.⁠[5][1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that on Friday, January 31, 2025, he was invited to an “urgent meeting” about the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and that Elon Musk attacked the agency in posts that weekend. The magazine writes that, as The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry disclosed, he had sent an email to DOGE colleagues in the days before: he had conducted a review of USAID payments made after Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDonald Trump (born 1946) is an American politician and businessman, a Republican who ran the real estate company the Trump Organization and starred in the television series The Apprentice. He served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has been the 47th president since 2025.Open the full entry ordered the agency to pause development spending, and wrote: “I could be wrong.” “My numbers could be off.” The magazine adds that afterward someone posted “traitor” under his TikTok videos.⁠[1]

The Flatwater Free Press wrote in February 2025 that, as ProPublica had found, he helped dismantle an agency that oversaw $40 billion in foreign aid; TechCrunch writes that he was listed as a senior advisor in the employee directories of several federal departments, among them those of the State Department, USAID and the Department of Energy.⁠[3][4]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that on the first Sunday in February, Wired magazine identified six of those who had answered Elon Musk’s call, among them him; the next day Nat Friedman posted, “Luke Farritor is a national treasure,” and Elon Musk replied, “The quality of the @DOGE Team is epic.” The Flatwater Free Press writes that on February 2, 2025, he was named among the young engineers working for DOGE.⁠[1][3]

FOX NewsFOX NewsFOX News is a U.S. television and digital news media brand centered on FOX News Channel and owned by Fox Corporation, with operations spanning news reporting, political commentary and digital content.Open the full entry wrote on February 4, 2025, that Wired had found him and three others to have working GSA email addresses along with “A-suite level clearance,” which allowed them to work on GSA’s top floor with access to all of its IT systems. The article also carried Elon Musk’s defense of DOGE in a reply to Senator Chuck Schumer, “Hysterical reactions like this is how you know that @DOGE is doing work that really matters,” while a White House spokesperson said that those leading the mission with Elon Musk were doing so “in full compliance with federal law.”⁠[15]

CNN wrote on February 7, 2025, that agency sources identified him as one of the young staffers holding titles in internal systems, and that, as two people with knowledge of the situation said, Energy Secretary Chris Wright had granted him access to the Department of Energy’s IT system on the Wednesday of that week, over objections from members of the department’s general counsel and chief information offices.⁠[13]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that on Friday, February 7, 2025, he and four other young men from DOGE walked onto the fourth-floor executive suite of the CFPB, and that Erie Meyer, who had just resigned as chief technologist and was packing up her office, could identify only one of them: him; Erie Meyer noticed him and others jiggling the handles of locked office doors, trying to get in. TechCrunch writes that he also requested access to data held by Medicare and Medicaid and by the CFPB. The Flatwater Free Press writes that The New York Times had found him to be looking at an agency that controls the health care of millions of poor and elderly Americans.⁠[1][4][3]

The Flatwater Free Press published an article on February 12, 2025, about the reactions in his home state to his work at DOGE. Representative Mike Flood, who represents Nebraska’s 1st Congressional District, asked, “When did we turn into that kind of a people?” and said: “this young man goes to Washington because he’s exceptionally bright. We should be celebrating the fact that one of our own is at the table working to return fiscal sanity to the United States of AmericaUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry.”⁠[3]

Scott Henderson, who funds and mentors Nebraska startups through NMotion, said: “It was a dagger to the heart,” and: “One of our best and brightest is now involved in something like that.” His uncle, Pat Farritor, said: “Obviously he’s a lot smarter than you and I,” and “I know he’s going to make the right decisions.” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean at the Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry School of Management, said of him: “He is completely dispensable. He is interchangeable.” William Resh, an associate professor in the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, said: “The plan comes straight from, in many respects, the Project 2025 playbook.”⁠[3]

The article states that he did not respond to requests for comment, nor did his father, other members of his family or several former bosses, and that a spokesperson for the University of Nebraska–Lincoln declined to answer questions about him.⁠[3]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that when its reporter came to the family home in April 2025, his father, Shane Farritor, said at the door that it was too dangerous for the family to talk about his son, about DOGE or about the threats they had received; his father also declined the magazine’s interview requests.⁠[1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in May 2025 FOX News aired a meeting that Elon Musk had led at 10 p.m. the night before in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building; he sat at the table with Elon Musk, Jesse Watters, Steve Davis and Sam Corcos, wore a tie and sat up straight, but said nothing that made it on air.⁠[1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that on May 30, 2025, Elon Musk joined the president in the Oval Office to formally announce that he was leaving DOGE, and that the next day, as senior staff such as Steve Davis followed Elon Musk out of Washington, he became a permanent government employee: a senior adviser at the General Services Administration, designated GS-15, the highest salary rank for civilians, earning $167,603. The magazine writes that he was living in a historic neighborhood in the District of Columbia and being driven around in a black SUV.⁠[1]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that on July 23, 2025, President Donald Trump spoke at an AI summit in Washington, after which there was a private party at a new members-only club, and that he was among those invited; the magazine writes that he was still working at the General Services Administration at the time.⁠[1]

On July 29, 2025, Bloomberg Businessweek published a long article about him. Drawing on interviews with dozens of current and former government employees and on lawsuits and records seen by the magazine, it states that after USAID he helped assess, slash or dismantle at least nine departments and agencies: the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Management and Budget, the Departments of Education, Energy, Labor and Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, the Federal Bureau of InvestigationFederal Bureau of InvestigationThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the federal investigative agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. It grew out of a force of special agents organized by Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte in 1908, has used its present name since 1935 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.Open the full entry and the CFPB.⁠[1]

The article states that he worked on “Defend the Spend,” a section of the DOGE website where agencies had to give the rationale for every expense approval; that he was invited with 17 others to the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office to update JD VanceJD VanceJD Vance (born 1984) is an American politician and author, a Republican who served as a U.S. senator from Ohio and has been the 50th vice president of the United States since 2025.Open the full entry on DOGE’s efforts; and that he has been referenced in at least 23 lawsuits.⁠[1]

The article states that an anonymous former senior government official said the United States Digital Service had required applicants to have a college degree and at least five years of industry experience; Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, responded that DOGE “rigorously evaluated its technical and engineering talent by administering an industry-standard coding exercise,” together with background checks. Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad and a DOGE member who was fired after saying to a journalist that he was impressed by the efficiency of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said: “He’s young, he’s early in his career, and he wanted to impress certain people.”⁠[1]

The article also carries a statement emailed by Casey Handmer, who worked with Farritor on the Vesuvius Challenge and remains in contact with him: “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.” The article states that he did not respond to the magazine’s interview requests or written questions.⁠[1]

On March 31, 2026, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a memorandum opinion on the parties’ motions for summary judgment in American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, et al. v. Department of Labor, et al. (No. 25-339): finding genuine disputes of material fact, the court denied both sides’ motions on the Administrative Procedure Act claims (Counts II and IV), granted summary judgment to the defendants on the ultra vires claim (Count I) and held that the plaintiff unions have associational standing.⁠[14]

In discussing whether the agencies had changed their data access policies, the opinion takes him as an example: the HHS chief information officer testified that he needed access to HCAS because an executive order required HHS to look at systems for waste, fraud and abuse; the court observed that HHS had not pointed to such an executive order in place on January 29, 2025, and that the order it cited was issued nearly a month after he was granted access to HCAS, and wrote: “Farritor’s access to HCAS is not an isolated case.” The court did not decide whether the access HHS gave him violated the Privacy Act, and it compelled HHS to respond to the plaintiffs’ interrogatory.⁠[14]

His father, Shane Farritor, is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a co-founder of the surgical robotics company Virtual Incision; the Flatwater Free Press writes that his father has received millions of dollars in federal funding for his work in robotics.⁠[1][3]

His mother, Tracy Slocum Farritor, is a physician, whom Bloomberg Businessweek describes as calling herself a patriot; in a 2015 Kickstarter video for an animated show, Renny & Bo, she said: “I think America is the greatest nation on Earth, and I think it’s OK to teach that.” The campaign fell short.⁠[1]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that state records show him registered as a Republican in Lancaster County, and that a classmate described him as “a libertarian who talked passionately about dismantling government regulations.” Bloomberg Businessweek writes that in Politichat, a group chat set up by Raikes students, he identified himself as “hopelessly libright”; his Twitter feed featured Elon Musk alongside the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc AndreessenMarc AndreessenMarc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While in college he helped develop the graphical web browser Mosaic, then co-founded Netscape and Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware), and has long served as a director of Meta; he has also published essays such as “Why Software Is Eating the World.”Open the full entry and Peter Thiel, and a classmate said: “He thought that Musk was the closest thing to Iron Man.” At a “Roman dinner” at Nat Friedman’s home in the Bay Area he met Patrick CollisonPatrick CollisonPatrick Collison is an entrepreneur who grew up in Ireland. In 2010 he cofounded the payments and financial infrastructure company Stripe with his brother John Collison and serves as its chief executive; he is also a cofounder of the biomedical research organization Arc Institute and has been a director of Meta since 2025.Open the full entry, a co-founder of Stripe, David HolzDavid HolzDavid Holz is an American entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of the AI image generation service Midjourney, who earlier co-founded the hand-tracking hardware company Leap Motion; his remarks on training data sources, content moderation, and medical hardware have repeatedly drawn controversy.Open the full entry, the founder of Midjourney, and the economist Tyler Cowen, of whom he said: “He’s another person I’ve looked up to.”⁠[3][1]

The Flatwater Free Press writes that as recently as December 24, 2024, his website said he dreamed of leading companies, starting a family and pursuing “worthy side quests,” and that the site listed joining Sand Hills Golf Club, which the article calls Nebraska’s top-rated private course, as a lifelong goal.⁠[3]

Bloomberg Businessweek writes that the artist Charley Friedman wanted a musical installation that people could move through and needed someone who could code and build it; he was around 15 when he began working with Charley Friedman and 19 when they first exhibited Soundtracks for the Present Future, a work of 59 hanging, computer-controlled guitars and mandolins, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. Charley Friedman always referred to him as the exhibition engineer. The magazine writes that a video from January 2022, when he was a sophomore, shows him and Charley Friedman installing the work at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, and that he also traveled to Los Angeles to help Charley Friedman install it at Azusa Pacific University. The article adds that he considered becoming an artist and started to create what he called an “exploding toaster”; at 21, after his internship at SpaceX Starbase, he said: “I realized what I love to do is to solve other people’s problems.”⁠[1]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]

General Services Administration: Official website: https://www.gsa.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

X: Public account: https://x.com/LukeFarritor (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/lukeboi (opens in a new window).⁠[18][7]