Elon Musk elusive protégé at the Department of Government Efficiency has spoken out for the first time to share his role at the agency.

At the age of 19, Edward Coristine, also known by his nickname ‘Big Balls,’ participated in a comprehensive discussion with Fox News’ Jesse Watters alongside his coworkers. During the conversation, he emphasized the significance of his role in the team.

As a senior advisor at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Office of Personnel Management, he described his responsibilities as primarily focused on ‘computer-related tasks.’

He explained that a key project they are working on involves tackling issues of fraud and inefficiency. To achieve this, they have delved into examining computer systems as part of their initiative to address the lack of transparency concerning financial transactions.

‘You look at a specific line item, $20 million. OK what is it going to? For the majority of payment systems it’s like we don’t really know.’

‘It’s a huge cause for concern because the upstream thing,  which is distributing money, literally has no checks and no accountability to the actual American taxpayer,’ Coristine continued. 

He added that ‘there’s no incentive to’ respect taxpayer dollars ‘if you work in the government.

‘I think the incentives will always decide the outcomes,’ the teenager said.

His interview marked the first time the teenager has revealed himself to the public, as his boss leaves the White House. 

Coristine, who was raised in a wealthy town in Westchester County outside New York City as the son of a popcorn baron, also spoke about how he got his X-rated nickname.

He was a junior at a $50,000-per-year Rye Country Day School, where his bored math classmates were passing a note around.

When it got to him, Coristine ‘drew a phallic object and wrote BIG BALLS on it,’ a current student who heard the story told New York Magazine.

‘Then a math teacher took it out of his hands and read it out loud to the class. Then I guess he embraced it because he changed his LinkedIn name to that.’

Speaking about the incident on Thursday, Coristine said he ‘just set it as my LinkedIn username,’ drawing laughs from Watters and others at the table.

‘People on LinkedIn take themselves like super seriously and are pretty averse to risk, and I was like “I want to be neither of those things.”‘

‘Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would know,’ he said. 

The roundtable, which aired on Jesse Watters’ Primetime on Thursday, marked the end of Musk’s reign at the White House.

Reflecting on his time in the Trump administration, Musk and his staffers shared what they saw as victories in cutting government waste.

They once again claimed that the Social Security Administration is rife with fraud, as people over the age of 120 are receiving benefits – though that claim has widely been disputed.

‘Is the Small Business Administration giving loans to dead people, people over the age of 120?’ one DOGE employee asked, rhetorically. ‘The answer was “yes” and it was around $330 million in total.’

At that point, Musk jumped in and claimed that these people’s birthdates ‘could not possibly be real, meaning they were over 115 years old… Safe to say if anybody is in the system at 115 years or older, that is fake.’

He went on to assert that only a fraction of taxpayer funds reach their designated recipients – pointing specifically to the Inter-America Foundation, which DOGE left with only one employee. 

‘They get $50 million a year, congressional money, for things like farming in Peru,’ Musk claimed. ‘That’s a real example,’ he said before sharing others: ‘improving the marketability of peas in Guatemala, fruit jam.

‘You might expect in the private sector, nonprofit 80 or 90 percent of their money to grantees,’ the Tesla CEO intoned. ‘In the case of IAF, that was 58 percent. So the  other half goes towards management, travel.

‘An example is that even if you agree with supporting alpaca farmers in Peru, actually most of the money never made it out of DC. It’s going to the pockets of people in the neighborhood.’

The DOGE crew also spoke about their experiences at different agencies – with one claiming he visited the federal ‘retirement cave’ in Pennsylvania, where the entire federal government’s retirement paperwork is reportedly done by hand.

The staffer said its existence shows the need for widespread IT upgrades across the federal government. 

Even though Musk is now taking a step back, they said their work will continue.

‘It’s a long-term enterprise,’ Musk said. ‘Because if we take our eye off the ball, the waste and fraud will come roaring back.’

Staffers have previously said his team stationed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building will carry on the SpaceX founder’s vision.