| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today, Susan Berfield, Margi Murphy and Jason Leopold delve into Luke Farritor’s peculiar journey from helping decipher ancient Roman scrolls to becoming the ultimate DOGE dude. You can find the whole story online here. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. Before he was called a patriot and a traitor for following Elon Musk to Washington to join DOGE; before he was hired by the US government despite a résumé that would have been previously rejected; before he was granted extensive access to sensitive data and invited to brief the country’s vice president; before he met his Twitter heroes in Silicon Valley; before he became a Thiel Fellow, which required him to become a college dropout; before he was celebrated internationally for using AI to help detect passages in a scroll charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius; before all of that, Luke Farritor, now 23, was a homeschooled kid in Lincoln, Nebraska, who called himself lukethecoder64. Back then, he responded to the prompt “You Know You’re a Nerd When…” with “you listen to ‘White ’n nerdy’ by Weird Al and think it’s a biography of you.” The Martian was one of his favorite books. He was a bell ringer at church. He played piano and golf, chess and Kerbal Space Program. During his high school summers, he helped build an app that could link those in need to local charities. It’s still in use.  Stills of Farritor and the DOGE team being interviewed by Jesse Watters on Fox News on May 1. Source: Fox News Back then, his father introduced him to an artist, Charley Friedman, who wanted to create a musical installation that people could move through, hearing different notes at different times, an experience individual and communal. “I’ve always been interested in how humans are easily manipulated by power, by bright lights,” Friedman says. He needed someone who could code and build and commit to a project that was then a concept. Farritor was around 15 when he began working with Friedman and 19 when they first exhibited Soundtracks for the Present Future, composed of 59 hanging, computer-controlled guitars and mandolins, at a contemporary arts center in Omaha. Farritor called it magical. It was featured on public television in Nebraska and traveled to museums around the country. Friedman always referred to Farritor as the exhibition engineer. Being around artists allowed Farritor to see “how they approach their careers, how they approach their lives,” he said in a university news story. “It really rubbed off on me, I think.” He considered becoming an artist. He started to create what he called an exploding toaster. “He was devising some things that he thought were kind of art pieces,” Friedman says. But at 21, after seven months as an intern at Musk’s SpaceX Starbase in Texas, he told Friedman he thought of himself differently: I realized what I love to do is to solve other people’s problems. Farritor was an inquisitive, uncommonly talented and sometimes obsessive young man. He had opportunities. He had people who cared about him, and those people had ideas of what he might achieve. Their ideas had nothing to do with Washington. Maybe Farritor didn’t know that his decision to help the man he so admired try to slash government spending would mean disappearing from his own life, working secretively but appearing in court documents. That it would mean disappointing and angering some, thrilling others. That in trying to solve one problem, he would play a part in creating chaos and distress and fear. Those he knew would not always be spared. His community in Lincoln would be cleaved. Maybe, some in his hometown say, he didn’t know there would be consequences. Keep reading: DOGE-Pilled |
