DOGE teen ran image-sharing site linked to URLs referencing pedophilia and the KKK

The site launched by Edward Coristine in 2021 promised to protect the privacy of its users, stating, “All your images are encrypted. We do not log IP addresses, device agents or anything else.”

Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched an image-sharing website in 2021 that featured custom “shitposting” web addresses that redirected to content hosted on his site. URLs that redirected to Coristine’s site referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Among the links were “child-porn.store” and “kkk-is-cool.club,” according to web traffic tracked by BuiltWith.

The White House and Coristine did not respond to requests for comment.

A former intern at Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, Coristine was named senior adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology on Monday, the Washington Post reported. He is also listed as an “expert” at the Office of Personnel Management.

In early 2021, Corisitine, then 16, activated the tesla.sexy website. He described it as an image-sharing site that would prioritize the confidentiality of its users. “Why are we the sexiest? Privacy… When you use tesla.sexy, all your images are encrypted. We do not log IP addresses, device agents or anything else,” the site’s homepage stated in March 2021, according to archives from the Wayback Machine. “If you like features like we do, you'll love tesla.sexy… Fake links, lots of cool domains and effects to put on your images for ultimate shitposting.”

Coristine updated the website’s homepage in April 2021, stating that it offered users, “Image hosting with a touch of insanity.” The site update indicated that it catered specifically to image-sharing among Discord users: “You can customize embeds, use fake links (only works on Discord), use random domains and much more… Images embed within a second on Discord. Uploading images is also an incredibly speedy process.” Again, Coristine emphasized that tesla.sexy would protect the identities of users who used the site to share images. “Images are encrypted at rest, and in transit,” the site stated.

An analysis of URL traffic to tesla.sexy between April 2021 and September 2021 shows that numerous noxious URLs redirected to Coristine’s site, including, “children-sex.party,” “child-porn.store,” “kkk-is-cool.club,” “nigga.rentals,” “nigga-sex.download,” “owns-a-slave.shop,” “raping-women.club,” “ketamine-rape.date,” “rape.business,” and “rapes-wo.men.” Internet archives of the URLs show they redirected traffic to tesla.sexy but any content they may have linked to has disappeared.

In December 2021, Corisitine registered tesla.sexy as a limited liability company in Connecticut.

It is unclear whether Coristine, who has gone by the online monikers “Rivage,” “Big Balls,” and “JoeyCrafter,” used or created any of the URLs. But they reflect the kinds of sordid online communities Coristine trafficked in during his high school years.

According to Krebs on Security, Coristine was a member of “The Com,” a disparate community of Telegram channels and Discord chatrooms that serves to facilitate collaboration between cybercriminals. A Wired report found that one of the domains operated by Tesla Sexy LLC provided a service to create AI bots for Russian Discord servers. In 2022, Coristine interned at Path, a security company that hired former cybercriminals to protect customers from denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. During the same year, a Telegram handle associated with Coristine sought to hire someone to commit a DDoS attack in a Com chatroom that exists for the sale and solicitation of cybercrimes.

Bloomberg reported that Coristine’s tenure at the company was cut short after he was accused of leaking proprietary information to a competing firm. After he was let go, he claimed on Discord that he could destroy Path’s servers if he wished to. “I had access to every single machine,” a Discord account connected to Coristine wrote in 2022.

In 2024, a Discord account tied to Coristine wrote that he had moved on from the Com underworld, saying there was not “a lot of money to be made in the [Com],” according to Krebs on Security. Coristine began working for Musk’s Neuralink later that year.

As for Coristine’s presence on the social media platform X, Musk Watch found that he interacted at least once with prominent eugenicist and white supremacist Joseph Bronski. Communication history saved on X shows that Coristine responded to a November 2023 post in which Bronski wrote, “White 12 year olds have higher IQs than black adults… Where should the IQ cut off for rights be? The current legal standard is inconsistent.” It is unclear what Coristine wrote in response to the post, as his reply has been deleted.

Other young men that Musk has recruited to staff the White House’s U.S. DOGE Service include Marko Elez, who resigned last week after the Wall Street Journal discovered a social media account he used to promote racism and eugenics. DOGE then rehired Elez at the behest of Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance. Gavin Kilger, a DOGE member who serves as a special advisor at the Office of Personnel Management and a domain administrator at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, shared content posted by white supremacist Nick Fuentes before joining the Trump administration, according to Reuters.

Correction: The original version of this story attributed reporting on Coristine’s ties to the Com to Wired. The story has been updated to attribute that information to Krebs on Security.