A young researcher who made headlines for deciphering an ancient scroll using AI last year is reportedly part of billionaire Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), established by President Donald Trump.
As head of the new advisory board tasked with slashing government spending and gutting programs, Musk has been given a dedicated White House office, which appears to be mostly run by a pack of inexperienced male engineers in their early 20s, Wired reported on Sunday, February 2.
DOGE sparked widespread alarm with its takeover of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA) over the last few days, during which Musk’s team was granted direct access to some of the most sensitive data in the federal government.
This team apparently includes Vesuvius Challenge winner Luke Farritor, who was co-awarded $700,000 for his use of artificial intelligence to decipher the contents of an unopened 2,000-year-old Greco-Roman scroll from Pompeii last February. Previously an engineering intern for SpaceX, Farritor’s LinkedIn says he was a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before dropping out in his final semester. He is currently a fellow at the Thiel Foundation, which is run by PayPal and Palantir Technologies founder Peter Thiel. Unnamed sources told Wired that the 23-year-old now has a working GSA email address and “A-suite level clearance” at the agency.
Launched in 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge doles out cash prizes to participants who can successfully unscramble the ancient text of the Herculaneum papyri collection, which was excavated from the Villa of the Papyri, a residence believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. The international challenge was created after a team led by University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales developed a way to “virtually unwrap” the scrolls with non-destructive microtomographic scanning, after they had been sealed from the heat of Pompeii’s volcanic mud and ash.
Hyperallergic has contacted Seales and Farritor for comment, and has attempted to reach Musk through SpaceX and Tesla.
The Vesuvius Challenge, however, is not the only research initiative into Ancient Rome that Musk is backing. The Musk Foundation has also announced a new grant initiative and contributions to support archaeological and conservation work through the American Institute for Roman Culture (AIRC), a nonprofit that leads the education platform Ancient Rome Live.
Musk’s apparent fascination with the Roman Empire comes as the billionaire faced backlash for performing a Nazi gesture that right-wing supporters apocryphally defended as a “Roman salute.” Though this greeting likely never existed in Roman times, University of Iowa history professor Sarah Bond and writer Stephanie Wong explained in Hyperallergic, Musk’s “brand of technocratic despotism and its social media iconography has roots in the work of 20th-century European fascists, who were themselves fixated on Ancient Rome.”
“Like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the billionaire has frequently expressed admiration for the Roman Empire, posting AI pictures of himself cosplaying as a Roman soldier and cooking up theories about why ancient Rome fell,” wrote Bond and Wong, who pointed out in a recent Bluesky post that the Musk Foundation contributed $2 million to the Vesuvius Challenge to help fund its cash prizes. (The organization is currently listed among the research initiative’s top sponsors, who are referred to as “Caesars.”)
“He is using the legitimacy, the aesthetics, and the historical clout that is connected to the Roman Empire to speak to his core demographic, which is white men,” Bond told Hyperallergic.
“When you don’t have legitimate power, you glom on to a previous empire that seems to have legitimacy and justification as a way of signaling your own legitimacy.”
