Silicon Valley Takes Washington D.C. by Storm

This week, Silicon Valley descended upon Washington D.C. in the form of fresh-faced engineers supposedly running the government. A bombshell report by Wired revealed that Elon Musk had quietly selected at least six engineers, with the oldest reportedly 24 years old, to help him run his Department of Government Efficiency.

The secrecy surrounding the group, combined with the inexperience of the identified six, drew ire from the Washington establishment. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stated, “The American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant through the executive branch.”

However, the situation has also spawned numerous mysteries. As the engineers are all reportedly under the age of 25, their digital footprints are limited, and most have avoided media attention. Musk has even stated that publicly naming these men was “a crime,” amounting to doxxing. As a result, the country is left to wonder who these young individuals are and what motivates them.

A Conversation with Luke Farritor

In late 2023, I spent an hour speaking to one of the newly crowned powerbrokers: Luke Farritor, a then-21-year-old computer science major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln working on the Vesuvius Challenge. This project, spearheaded by AI investor Nat Friedman, aimed to use AI to decode ancient scrolls.

Farritor, a Thiel Fellow, was like many young men in the Peter Thiel-verse: polite, 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 about his methods for dismantling the federal government. However, Farritor emphasized that the project showed him the power of coding and how technology enabled him to solve a problem that had stumped experts for decades.

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 father, Shane Farritor, is a professor of mechanical engineering at the 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.

One day on the drive to work, Farritor 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 even made 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 eventually took home the grand prize of $700,000, which he 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. However, 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.

“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.”