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A Palo Alto resident and Gunn High School graduate was identified by the magazine WIRED on Sunday as one of the engineers who is working with billionaire Elon Musk to gain access to federal government infrastructure and sensitive records from civil servants.

Ethan Shaotran, who graduated from Gunn in 2020, is an engineer who founded the company Energize.AI, according to his bio, at Harvard University, where he is a student. The company provides scheduling assistance.

Like the other five engineers identified by WIRED, he has a past affiliation with Musk, having participated in a hackathon organized by Musk’s artificial intelligence xAI, according to a post on X from October 2024. Shaotran’s team used Grok, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, to generate plausible responses from his X followers to a hypothetical question.

Shaotran did not respond to WIRED and he did not immediately respond to an email from this publication. His profiles on LinkedIn and X were both down on Sunday afternoon. According to an earlier LinkedIn post, he took a break from Harvard last year to start his company.

The six engineers, all men between 19 and 24 years of age, according to WIRED, have reportedly been working with Musk to take over the computer systems of critical federal departments, including the Office of Personnel Management, the General Services Administration and, most recently, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The team is part of the advisory group known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump created Jan. 20 through an executive order. While its stated purpose is “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” its moves over the past three days have alarmed civil servants, Democratic elected leaders and political observers who have raised concerns about privacy, regulatory capture and the vast amount of power now being wielded by Musk, who donated $288 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, according to the Washington Post.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that the team had gained access to the federal payment system at the U.S. Treasury, a move that followed a standoff with a Treasury official who was placed on administrative leave and then abruptly retired.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, issued a letter on Friday to Trump’s newly appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, raising concerns about DOGE accessing the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s payment system, which controls the flow of more than $6 trillion in payments.

“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Wyden wrote. “I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

The group’s work continued over the weekend, as Musk’s team reportedly entered the system of USAID, forcing out top security officials, according to CNN. The federal agency provides foreign aid and development assistance to nations around the globe. CNN reported that DOGE personnel wanted to gain access to the agency’s security systems and personnel files. Musk subsequently issued a post on X calling USAID a “criminal organization” and said it’s “time for it to die.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampsire, a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN on Sunday that reports of individuals without appropriate clearance accessing classified USAID spaces and personal information of U.S. citizens are “incredibly serious and unprecedented.” She indicated that a bipartisan group of senators will meet to discuss this issue on Monday.

Shaotran’s now-deleted LinkedIn page states that he had authored several AI books. He had also spoken to CNN in 2020 about taking a gap year so that he could intern at a technology company and write a book. As a sophomore at Gunn in 2018, he also talked to the student newspaper, The Oracle, about his interest in investing in technology.

“Any student who even has a couple of bucks lying around should be at least playing around with [the stock market],” he told The Oracle.

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