They wanted to fix SF government. Then Elon Musk came calling

Zsombor “Anthony” Jancso and Jordan Wick had lucrative jobs at blue-chip tech companies — the kind of roles that are increasingly tough for new college grads to come by. But for them, it wasn’t enough. 

Frustrated with the direction of San Francisco’s drift, they had a vision of young tech workers working hand-in-hand with local government to solve core challenges like homelessness, degrading public safety, and trash on city streets.

But after hosting a successful hackathon called Accelerate SF in November 2023, an event that featured the city’s brightest developers and most prominent civic leaders, including then-Mayor London Breed, they became disillusioned with the city’s bureaucracy and dismissive of local regulations. 

Now, the two have walked away from the effort and taken up roles at the federal Department of Government Efficiency, where their use of tech to transform government has taken on a more radical flavor. 

While Elon Musk announced that he is stepping back from the quasi-agency he heads, Jancso and Wick are still involved in its controversial work. Jancso, who had been recruiting staffers to DOGE, is now building AI agents meant to replace thousands of federal workers. Wick, a DOGE software engineer with a mandate to cut costs across government agencies, has been accused of siphoning off sensitive federal data. 

Jancso and Wick did not respond to requests for comment, and Jancso is now using legal threats to distance himself from an event promoting the hackathon.  

Former Accelerate SF associates have mixed feelings about the cofounders’ trajectory. Some expressed support for DOGE’s mission; others are dismayed to see the two turn promising tools toward dubious goals.

These former allies say they believed Jancso and Wick were serious about leading a civic-minded movement to improve San Francisco with emerging technology, but now see clear parallels between their initial efforts in the city and DOGE’s tendency to exaggerate claims and bulldoze through government, with little regard for existing structures. 

“The urge behind Accelerate SF was to build government capacity, not tear it apart like DOGE has tragically done,” said Peter Hirshberg, a civic entrepreneur who helped run Accelerate SF. Hirshberg is now setting up an MIT City Science Lab in San Francisco to research and propose policies for the city, an idea sparked following the hackathon. 

“It’s a little bit like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker,” Hirshberg said. “You can come from the same genes and choose the dark side or the light side.” 

Like many other 20-something transplants, Wick and Jancso were drawn to San Francisco by the allure of tech. Originally from Idaho, Wick was known as a “cracked” software engineer who worked at Flexport and Waymo after graduating from MIT. Jancso, a Hungarian native who won prestigious coding challenges at University College London, started his career at Palantir in New York before moving to San Francisco to explore the startup scene. 

The two ended up living together in Hayes Valley in 2023. Wick spent his free nights playing the board game Settlers of Catan, while Jancso frequented a writing club at the SF Commons community center. The pair were regulars at techie house parties and networked with scores of software developers just as the AI boom was taking off, according to those who knew them socially. 

But the excitement they felt over the technology’s potential was tempered by growing frustration at the way San Francisco was becoming a city defined by its social problems. In conversations, they voiced familiar concerns about the global tech capital being stuck in a doom loop and at risk of becoming a failed city. Crossing the two wires, they conceived the idea of a hackathon that would convene AI-savvy developers and put them to work fixing civic dysfunction.

“Either of these guys could have gone and made a million dollars a year at OpenAI,” said Andrew Côté, one of the people they contacted for help planning the event. Côté, the founder of Deep Tech Week, hosted the duo in his Hayes Valley apartment for a freewheeling salon-style discussion about how AI could solve San Francisco’s problems.

“It was very clear to everyone that this city has so many issues, but it has so much potential, and this AI boom is so big,” said Côté, who later cohosted a larger brainstorming event with the two at SF Commons. “I think it was genuine wanting to make the city better.”

Early in their planning, the two sent a cold email to an official in the Breed administration and got a sympathetic hearing. The official, who requested anonymity because of her current job, found them to be enthusiastic and somewhat naive: “young, antisocial kids who were trying to do something impressive.” 

She began meeting them at her City Hall office and provided help organizing the hackathon. But Jancso and Wick would overstay their welcome, often showing up unannounced to use her office as a workspace and eventually forcing her to kick them out. (They listed Accelerate SF’s official address as City Hall on the hackathon’s now-defunct website.) 

Jancso and Wick were repeatedly asked to remove the San Francisco seal from Accelerate SF promotional materials because it gave the false impression that they had an official partnership with the city. 

Despite the snags, the official continued helping them. Meanwhile, Hirshberg joined Accelerate SF as an official adviser, and events producer Kay Sorin came on as a cofounder. 

The hackathon was a success. Sorin, who now works at OpenAI and declined to comment, secured the free use of Founders Inc., a state-of-the-art venue at Fort Mason, while Scale AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies contributed sponsorship dollars and resources. Sorin worked her local connections to gain the attendance of political leaders, including Breed, state Sen. Scott Wiener, and Supervisors Joel Engardio and Catherine Stefani. 

During the hackathon, the politicians and civic experts collaborated with 22 teams on AI-driven projects tackling topics like trash collection, building permitting, and reporting property crimes. The winning team built “311 plus,” an AI program that uses a photo to automatically fill out a 311 report on a car break-in. The effort won plaudits from some of the city’s most powerful politicos. 

“This is revolutionary stuff,” City Attorney David Chiu said at the event. “I literally want to take each of these teams and put you as SWAT teams within the police department, the planning department, and 311. I’m a bit blown away.”

The idea was for the hackathon to jump-start an ambitious effort “to deploy some of these applications working with the departments and the San Francisco government,” Jancso said at the time. Finalists were promised introductions to government officials and agencies in order to follow through on their ideas. 

The team toasted their success over beer and sausages at the German restaurant Radhaus. But the comity did not last long. Jancso and Sorin had disagreements over a television appearance and the disqualification of a hackathon participant, culminating in him booting her from the Accelerate SF X account mere days after the event. Then, he and Wick announced their next move.

“It is in our power to build San Francisco into the world’s most technologically advanced city,” they wrote on X, with a link to an application to join their effort to deploy the tech built at the hackathon. “If we can accelerate SF, we can accelerate the rest of America.”

In a manner that foreshadowed Musk’s pronouncements about DOGE shaving trillions from the national debt, Accelerate SF overpromised and underdelivered. According to participants, the aftermath of the hackathon was disorganized. 

“They said that they would connect us to people for the project so we could get [the app] used by the city,” said one developer who was part of a finalist team and requested anonymity because of their current job. “But it never really went anywhere.”

By this time, Wick had been accepted into Y Combinator as cofounder of a separate startup, and Jancso became Accelerate’s main leader. The developer, who had volunteered on local campaigns for years, started to perceive Jancso as ignorant about how the city worked. After Jancso made a few perfunctory, failed attempts to set up meetings with government officials, the developer’s team gave up trying to work with him. 

“He wanted to take it from a project that we were all doing into a project he was doing,” the developer said.

Jancso told the Breed administration official he was starting a government consulting business and wanted a contract from the SF Municipal Transportation Agency to rebuild the bus routing system using AI. The official encouraged him to build technology to help residents interface with the government or go through the process of becoming a city supplier to bid on contracts. She even pitched him on rebuilding SF OpenBook, a public database with information on city spending, contracts, and employee compensation. But Jancso ignored her suggestions and asked to be handed government contracts. 

“What you build on a Tuesday is not going to replace the MTA system until you become a serious company that can burden $100 million of insurance,” the official said she told Jancso. “Anthony definitely found it very frustrating that we weren’t all very excited about his ideas.”

Hirshberg tracked Jancso’s growing sense of exasperation with City Hall during their regular catch-up calls. Hirshberg noted that it had become apparent to Jancso that the U.S. government didn’t and couldn’t work like a startup.   

“I started to notice his political shift shortly after the hackathon, when he began digging into how government actually works,” Hirshberg said. He added that Jancso — a foreign national — began talking about finding a way to land a government appointment to influence policy from within. “Anthony is a very ambitious, move-fast-and-break-things kind of tech developer.”

Hirshberg and others said Jansco’s progression came not out of a specific political affiliation but out of frustration with what he considered unnecessary bureaucratic barriers and belief in the superiority of the tech industry’s approach.

Then, Accelerate SF underwent a major pivot. Jancso celebrated the occasion with a launch party in May 2024 at his Hayes Valley apartment. As guests milled around in their socks, sparkling waters in hand, Jancso had a friend, startup founder Alex Reibman, proofread the tweet he was about to post. 

“Outdated tech is dragging down the US Government,” Jancso wrote in an X post announcing Accelerate X, “a modern OS for the government.” The startup, which Reibman thought of as a “mini-Palantir,” promised AI-powered solutions for governments to reduce spending, automate tedious work, and stay in compliance with the law. 

“It’s time for radical change,” Jancso wrote. 

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump began floating the idea of a government efficiency commission, led by Musk, charged with eliminating wasteful spending. The idea thrilled Jancso, who had spent most of his time at Palantir building technology to make the U.K.’s National Health Service more efficient. 

“An engineering-first gov efficiency commission by @elonmusk could save trillions annually. Exciting possibilities ahead!” Jancso tweeted three days after Trump won the presidential election.

Musk associate Steve Davis recruited Jancso to come to Washington and help him build out the DOGE team.

“I’m helping Elon’s team find tech talent for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the new admin,” Jancso posted in a Palantir alumni group chat in December, according to Wired. “This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.”

His recruitment drive had mixed reactions, but one engineer who ended up joining DOGE was AccelerateSF cofounder Wick, who currently works for the agency as a roving software engineer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other federal departments. A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices, subsequently alleged that Wick was building a backdoor to extract files from its internal case management system, according to an NPR report.

Wick has scrubbed his internet presence; his LinkedIn page no longer exists, and his X account is visible only to his followers. His feed includes retweets of AI research papers, a GrowSF voting guide, and a Y Combinator post with a photo of him and his cofounder, Sasha Zhang. In February, his photo and bio disappeared from the startup’s YC webpage. Zhang did not respond to questions about Wick’s involvement in the startup, Intercept. 

Jancso, too, is attempting to control his online image. On May 14, he threatened legal action against San Francisco event producer Steven Echtman over a YouTube video posted in 2023, prior to the Accelerate SF hackathon. The recording, taken at an AI summit, is of a panel on civic innovation featuring Jancso, Hirshberg, and others. Jancso’s lawyers sent Echtman a take-down order, claiming the video was made illegally, without Jancso’s consent. Echtman declined to comment. 

After helping DOGE recruit “hardcore engineers,” Jancso is working on yet another pivot of Accelerate. He’s building “secure AI agents for government” and partnering with DOGE to deploy the agents across federal agencies. 

The project could free up more than 70,000 federal employees for “higher-impact work,” according to a post by Jancso in a Palantir alumni Slack channel. Jancso’s post was largely met with derision, as Palantir alumni responded with clown and custom “fascist” emojis, according to Wired. 

At a hack night a few months ago in South Park, Jancso told a friend he was working to make the U.S. government more like SpaceX in terms of its management and structure. 

Reactions to Jancso and Wick’s trajectory from Accelerate SF to DOGE fall along familiar divides. Côté, an early supporter, sees their move to DOGE as an indictment of local bureaucracy. Indeed, the city has announced it will shut down public access to an API that enables a citizen-made app for quicker 311 reports.

“Honestly, it’s gotta be a wake-up call for SF government,” said Côté. “People are so down to work with you from the inside, and now they’re attacking you from the outside, and isn’t that a shame?”

Reibman, who catches up with Jancso during the DOGE affiliate’s visits to San Francisco every few months, said developers in their social circle believe the government could benefit from “founder mode.” Reibman sees an increasing number of people from San Francisco’s hacker ecosystem, including DOGE software engineer Luke Farritor, taking on public-sector roles. 

“We definitely understand it’s contentious,” Reibman said. “But we’re optimistic that these guys are intelligent, mission-driven, and goodwilled about improving the government.” 

But those who were involved in Accelerate SF from the beginning are far less enthused about Jancso and Wick’s current work. 

One volunteer — who requested anonymity because she wasn’t allowed to speak to the media in her current job — said her initial excitement about DOGE’s use of AI to speed up the public sector has morphed into disgust because of the chaotic cuts of federal programs and employees. 

More than 260,000 federal workers have been fired, taken buyouts, or retired early, according to a Reuters tally. After initially promising $2 trillion in savings, DOGE says it has saved taxpayers an estimated $175 billion. However, the agency has a track record of repeatedly inflating its cost-saving efforts and posting erroneous claims about canceling federal contracts. 

Hirshberg, who thought Accelerate SF had the potential to be a successful movement if Jancso and Wick invested time in understanding how they could work with the government, believes the two are now part of a misguided mission. Whereas the hackathon brought together developers, experts, and politicians to discuss problems and conceptualize technical solutions, DOGE is “a jihad against the government,” Hirshberg said.

“It’s enthusiasm without wisdom,” he added. “It’s ‘Break things,’ not ‘Make things.’”