A top employee of billionaire Elon Musk who is now working in the U.S. Justice Department previously bragged about hacking and distributing pirated software, according to archived copies of his former websites reviewed by Reuters.
Christopher Stanley, a 33-year-old engineer who has worked at both Musk’s social media company X and space-launch company SpaceX, is a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General’s office, according to a former Justice Department official and a staff directory listing reviewed by Reuters.
Stanley was assigned there while working for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that President Donald Trump set up to slash the federal bureaucracy. Musk has said no “organization has been more transparent” than DOGE, but there’s been little public information on the responsibilities and background of its staff.
Stanley ran a series of websites and forums starting as far back as 2006, when he was 15, registration data preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools shows. Several of those sites distributed pirated ebooks, bootleg software and video game cheats, according to copies maintained by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit whose ‘Wayback Machine’ preserves old websites.
Stanley boasted about hacking into websites on at least two of the forums, according to archived posts, one of which dates to when he was 19. At the time, he said he had put his hacking days behind him. But a YouTube video he posted in 2014 shows his involvement in the breach of customer data from a rival hacking group, when he was 23.
In response to questions for this story, the Justice Department did not directly address Stanley’s current role or his past but said he had an active security clearance that predated his employment at DOGE. In a statement to Reuters, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had “full trust and confidence in Chris’s ability to help the federal government.” Stanley, the White House, SpaceX and X did not respond to requests for comment.
In the hours after Reuters contacted Stanley, several of his old websites vanished from the Internet Archive. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, declined to answer specific questions about the disappearance of Stanley’s websites but said people who own the rights to sites can request to have their URLs excluded from the archive.
National security professionals were largely split on how seriously to take Stanley’s past. Six former Justice officials told Reuters his background raised red flags, noting that the department handles sensitive information, including details of federal investigations and other information protected by grand jury secrecy rules.
