One of Elon Musk’s young DOGE engineers explains how he won the $700K Vesuvius Challenge

This week, Silicon Valley came barrelling into Washington, D.C., in the form of fresh-faced engineers supposedly running the government. A bombshell Wired report said that Elon Musk had quietly selected at least six engineers, the oldest of which is reportedly 24, to help him run his Department of Government Efficiency. 

The secrecy of the group, as well as the inexperience of the identified six, drew ire from the Washington establishment. ​​“The American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant through the executive branch,” Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.

But mostly, it has spawned six new mysteries. Since the engineers are all reportedly under the age of 25, their digital footprints are limited, and, in true Muskian fashion, most have eschewed any media. Musk has even said that publicly naming these men was “a crime,” amounting to doxxing. So the country has been left to wonder who these young people are and what motivates them. 

In late 2023, I spent an hour speaking to one of these newly crowned powerbrokers: Luke Farritor, a then-21-year-old “run-of-the-mill computer science major” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln working on the Vesuvius Challenge. That’s an effort spearheaded by AI investor Nat Friedman to use AI to decode ancient scrolls. Farritor, a Thiel Fellow, was like many young men in the Peter Thiel-verse: polite (he referred to me as “ma’am”), prone to tangents about bygone civilizations, and committed to technology above all. 

Our conversation was primarily about the Vesuvius Challenge, so I didn’t ask, say, what methods he would use to dismantle the federal government should he be called upon to do so in the future. But Farritor did emphasize that the project showed him the power of coding — how technology enabled him to solve a problem that had stumped experts for decades. “Even if you’re just some scrawny kid from Nebraska, you can work hard and make an impact,” he said. 

“We’re here to help”

When Farritor joined SpaceX in early 2023, as an intern working on the Starship launch pad software, he was following in his father’s footsteps. His dad, Shane Farritor, is a professor of mechanical engineering at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and cofounder of surgical robotics company Virtual Incision. Farritor shared his father’s passion for technology, working long hours to help facilitate Starship launches. “I just worked super hard night and day for all seven months,” Farritor said of his internship, describing it as “a ton of fun.” 

One day on the drive to work, he heard Friedman on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, describing the mystery of the Vesuvius scrolls: papyrus documents buried in 79 AD by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The scrolls looked like blocks of charcoal, but Friedman and a handful of professors believed that, with 3D modeling and AI technology, someone could read them. He offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who succeeded. 

Farritor had studied Latin and was fascinated by ancient civilizations. “I always read about archeology growing up, and it’s like, wow, now I get to actually be involved in a project with Richard Janko,” he recalled, referring to the classics scholar who was a judge for the Vesuvius Challenge.

After listening to the podcast, Farritor went home to his Texas apartment and started working, creating software that could detect patterns on the charred paper that would correlate to letters. He went as far as making his own test scrolls, buying up papyrus from Amazon and burning it in the oven of his father’s robotics company. 

Friedman announced some of the cash prize recipients on a livestream — right before a Starship launch where Farritor’s job was to check all 60-something computers in Mission Control. “I have this very distinct memory where in my left hand I’m holding this livestream of Nat talking,” he said. “And then, with my right hand, I’m going from computer to computer, turning on each thing in Mission Control.”  

Farritor and his friends would eventually take home the grand prize of $700,000, which Farritor told me he’d use to pay off his parents’ mortgage, “buy the new iPhone,” and likely put the rest into “starting a company.” 

His plans back then were a far cry from his current gig, where Wired reports he has a government email and access to the physical office at the General Services Administration. 

But his time at the Vesuvius Challenge did include run-ins with the university establishment. He described the Vesuvius Challenge organizers butting heads with the university bureaucracy as they tried to access certain high-tech scanners. His view as to why the team should get the access they wanted: they were trying to help.

“Yes, we’re a bunch of Silicon Valley tech bros, but we’re here to help and kind of build all that good will,” he said of the project’s university dealings. “It’s a very delicate balance, right? People are very complicated creatures.”