Meet Akash Bobba, The UC Berkeley Graduate Of Indian Descent Chosen For Elon Musk’s DOGE

Akash Bobba

Within the department, the functions of the six engineers—Ethan Shaotran, Gautier Cole Killian, Luke Farritor, Edward Coristine, Gavin Kliger, and Akash Bobba—are not clearly defined.

According to a WIRED story, tech tycoon Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has hired six young engineers between the ages of 19 and 24, including Akash Bobba, an Indian-origin graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and a previous intern at Meta. These young professionals are playing important roles in DOGE while having little experience with the government, which has raised serious questions about their credentials and access to private government information.

DOGE was created by former President Donald Trump’s executive order with the goal of modernizing federal software and technology to increase productivity and efficiency across government agencies. Within the department, the functions of the six engineers—Ethan Shaotran, Gautier Cole Killian, Luke Farritor, Edward Coristine, Gavin Kliger, and Akash Bobba—are not clearly defined.

Akash Bobba received his degree from the esteemed Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology department at UC Berkeley. In addition to his earlier internships at Meta and Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, Bobba interned at Bridgewater Associates hedge fund last spring, according to his since-deleted LinkedIn page, which WIRED was able to get. Additionally, he talked about getting his ideal career on a podcast with Aman Manazir.

Bobba reports directly to Chief of Staff Amanda Scales, who was previously employed at Musk’s AI business, xAI, and is designated as an “expert” at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), along with Edward Coristine. Both Bobba and Coristine have functioning emails at the General Services Administration (GSA), according to internal documents, and they have A-suite level clearance, which allows them access to all of the agency’s physical locations and IT systems.

On social media, a picture of four DOGE engineers went viral. “Wait, my moot is running the Treasury, what?” said Aidan McLaughlin of OpenAI.

UC Berkeley peer Charis Zhang responded by praising Bobba’s technical skills and describing how, after Zhang unintentionally erased a whole database before a deadline, Bobba recreated it overnight. Similar opinions were expressed by other users, who called Bobba one of the sharpest people they had ever encountered.

“Allow me to tell you about Akash. I unintentionally erased our entire codebase two days prior to the deadline while working on a project at Berkeley. I went into a panic. Akash simply shrugged and rewrote everything from scratch in a single night, making it better than before. He wrote on X, “We turned in our work ahead of schedule and won first place in the class.”

Government authorities and experts are alarmed by the hiring of these young engineers, the majority of whom have ties to Musk and his long-time partner Peter Thiel. The engineers’ top-level clearance at the GSA, which would give them access to extremely sensitive federal data, is of particular worry to critics.

Already, there have been reports of DOGE employees trying to gain unauthorized access to confidential material at the US Agency for International Development (USAID). According to Reuters, two senior security officers who stopped these attempts were put on forced leave. Later, the Associated Press verified that DOGE employees had in fact accessed secret documents.

Fears of regulatory capture, in which people with connections to the private sector could use their positions for personal benefit, have increased as a result of the DOGE effort. Concerns were heightened by reports that the Trump administration temporarily handed security clearances to unscreened applicants, according to sources quoted by WIRED.

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