A SpaceX and X engineer, Christopher Stanley—currently serving as a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General’s office at the Department of Justice (DOJ)—was reportedly caught bragging about hacking and distributing pirated e-books, bootleg software, and game cheats.
The boasts appeared on archived versions of websites, of which several, once flagged, were quickly deleted, Reuters reported.
Stanley was assigned to the DOJ by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While Musk claims that DOGE operates transparently, not much is known about who the staffers are or what their government roles entail. It remains unclear what Stanley does at DOJ, but Reuters noted that the Deputy Attorney General’s office is in charge of investigations into various crimes, “including hacking and other malicious cyber activity.” Declining to comment further, the DOJ did confirm that as a “special government employee,” like Musk, Stanley does not draw a government salary.
The engineer’s questionable past seemingly dates back to 2006, Reuters reported, when Stanley was still in high school. The news site connected Stanley to various sites and forums by tracing various pseudonyms he still uses, including Reneg4d3, a nickname he still uses on YouTube. The outlet then further verified the connection “by cross-referencing the sites’ registration data against his old email address and by matching Reneg4d3’s biographical data to Stanley’s.”
Among his earliest sites was one featuring a “crude sketch of a penis” called fkn-pwnd.com, where Stanley, at 15, bragged about “fucking up servers,” a now-deleted Internet Archive screenshot reportedly showed. Another, reneg4d3.com, was launched when he was 16. There, Stanley branded a competing messaging board “stupid noobs” after supposedly gaining admin access through an “easy exploit,” Reuters reported. On Bluesky, an account called “doge whisperer” alleges even more hacking activity, some of which appears to be corroborated by an IA screenshot of another site Stanley created, electonic.net (sic), which as of this writing can still be accessed.
