Edward Coristine got his nickname by accident. In math class during his junior year at Rye Country Day School, students were passing notes and, “when it got to him, he drew a phallic object and wrote BIG BALLS on it,” according to a current upperclassman. “Then a math teacher took it out of his hands and read it out loud to the class. Then I guess he embraced it because he changed his LinkedIn name to that.” Angad Sethi, one of Coristine’s best friends from high school, says, “To him, it was sort of talking about having big balls, being a risk-taker. That’s who he is. It was a joke, but it does have a meaning.”
Coristine’s hometown of Larchmont, a wealthy, mostly liberal enclave about an hour north of New York City, is an unlikely breeding ground for a right-wing foot soldier. His father, Charles, is a Wall Street veteran who bought the organic-snack company LesserEvil in 2011 and turned it into a behemoth with annual sales exceeding $100 million. (LesserEvil emailed customers “in light of recent events” to say that it is in “no way” affiliated with politics.) “His dad definitely inspires him,” Sethi says. And so does Musk: Coristine taught himself how to code and skipped senior prom to intern at Musk’s Neuralink, which develops brain-implantable computer chips. “It’s a compulsory thing for him to achieve,” Sethi says.
Coristine was a ubiquitous presence on messaging platforms such as Discord, where interests in gaming and cryptocurrency mingle with casual bigotry, trolling culture, and low-sophistication attacks on websites and users. “All of these online communities, they’re very hierarchical, and it’s very trust-based; things are very relationship-based,” says Andrew Morris, founder of the cybersecurity firm GreyNoise Intelligence. “People will try to win other people over by pulling some kind of stunt, any kind of prank to show they’re the man.”…. Morris said that Coristine appeared to be savvier than the median Discord lurker but that the way he asked about the attack suggested limited know-how. “It’s like saying ‘I want a capable, powerful key to this door,’” he says. “He’s got enough rope to hang himself with at a technical level, but he’s not splitting the atom anytime soon.”
“He’s really developed as a person in the last couple of months,” Sethi says. “I think school — high school, college — isn’t for him. It’s just too limited. There’s some people that need education to learn, and there are some people that don’t need it.”
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