One of the workers that Elon Musk has placed in government roles through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency once launched an image-sharing website that referenced obscene topics while promising privacy.
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old first-year student at Northeastern University who last week was named senior adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, launched the site tesla.sexy in 2021 that featured custom “sh--posting” web addresses that redirected to content that "referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape," reported the Musk Watch website.
"Among the links were 'child-p--n.store' and 'kkk-is-cool.club,' according to the report.
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“Why are we the sexiest? Privacy… When you use tesla.sexy, all your images are encrypted," the website's homepage stated in March 2021, according to Wayback Machine archives. "We do not log IP addresses, device agents or anything else."
“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 sh--posting.”
The website was updated a month later to offer users "Image hosting with a touch of insanity," emphasizing that user identities would be protected and their images would be encrypted every step of the way.
“You can customize embeds, use fake links (only works on Discord), use random domains and much more," the homepage stated in April 2021. "Images embed within a second on Discord. Uploading images is also an incredibly speedy process. Images are encrypted at rest, and in transit."
Musk Watch analyzed URL traffic on tesla.sexy between April 2021 and September 2021 that found obscene URLs redirected to the site, which he registered in December 2021 as a limited liability company in Connecticut.
Coristine, who has used the online aliases “Rivage,” “Big Balls,” and “JoeyCrafter,” was also reportedly a member of “The Com,” a wide-ranging community of Telegram channels and Discord chatrooms that hooks up cybercriminals for collaboration, but a Discord account linked to him posted last year that he was leaving the network because there wasn't enough money to be made there and instead took an internship at Musk's Neuralink company.
The teen was fired three years ago from an internship at Arizona-based data-security firm Path Network after he was involved in "leaking of proprietary company information," according to the company.