Transforming Twitter isn’t an easy task, but it’s one that billionaire Elon Musk has taken on for himself.
Since the Tesla and SpaceX founder bought the social media website for a whopping $44 billion at the end of October, the company has seen radical changes — around 4,700 staff have either quit or been fired, advertisers are fleeing the platform and people from all walks of life have been incessantly criticising Musk.
Amid all this chaos and massive churn in the company, Elon Musk has brought in the most unlikely of people, George Hotz, the noted iPhone hacker and considered by many to be Musk’s rival, for a 12-week internship stint to fix Twitter’s search feature, as well as to remove the prompt that prevents you from browsing the service on the web without logging in.
Unsurprisingly, the hire came about on Twitter itself. The internship offer came about when the 33-year-old Hotz extended his support to Musk when he asked Twitter employees to be ‘hardcore or quit’.
This is the attitude that builds incredible things. Let all the people who don’t desire greatness leave. https://t.co/Q3do2tjX4f
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 16, 2022
Hotz then added that he ‘was down’ for a 12-week internship at Twitter, which got the attention of Musk, who then added, “Sure, let’s talk.”
I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’m down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF.
It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive.
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 16, 2022
On 22 November, the programming prodigy then tweeted, ““Today, I'm a Tweep! The internet feels full of possibility again.”
As Hotz begins his new stint at Twitter, here’s what we know about him, his tenuous past with billionaire Elon Musk and what he plans to do at the social media network.
There’s something about Hotz
Hotz may be little known outside of the tech world but he is well established within it. He has founded several companies and has tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, Instagram, and code sharing platform GitHub.
At 17, he gained recognition by becoming the first person to hack Apple’s iPhone, allowing anyone to use the phone on networks other than AT&T’s. ‘Geohot’, as he was known then, also became the first person to crack the hardcore defence of the Sony PlayStation 3 when he was just 20 years old. He soon moved onto the world of artificial intelligence and founded car automation startup Comma.ai while still in his mid-20s.
Comma.ai aimed at making a driver assistance system to bring Tesla Autopilot–like functionality to other cars.
A look at Hotz’s blog shows that he’s highly intellectual and has a curiosity on topics ranging from the theory of money creation to an analysis of the terrorist manifesto of the Unabomber.
He has also suggested that governments should be replaced with benevolent machines, saying: “The idea is to replace the useful functions of the state with locally controlled and owned machines… If your stuff is cheaper and better, people just won’t use the state anymore.”
Becoming rivals with Musk
A Bloomberg profile of Hotz reveals that he had met Musk years ago at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, talking at length about the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence technology.
It wasn’t long before the two started figuring out a deal in which Hotz could help develop Tesla’s self-driving technology.
However, Hotz broke off the talks he felt that Musk kept changing the terms. “Frankly, I think you should just work at Tesla,” Musk had written to Hotz in an e-mail, according to the Bloomberg report.
“I appreciate the offer,” Hotz replied, “but like I’ve said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.”
The two parted ways in 2016 and it was then that Hotz set out to prove Musk wrong about his autopilot software and began developing his idea. Today, Comma.ai sells a $1,999 driver assistance developer kit that it claims is compatible with over 200 vehicles, and is working on turning this into a consumer product.
Getting back together with Musk
Putting aside their past history, Hotz has now been given three months to improve Twitter’s search and he’s wasting no time working out fixes.
When asked what is he looking to do, he said in a tweet that he intends to make it easier to find the search function’s advanced modifiers, and making the feature less reliant on typing the exact text you want to find.
How do you feel the quality of Twitter search is? What would get you to use Twitter search instead of Google?
BTW, there's some nice advanced search stuff here: https://t.co/CYMzuWD1HT
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 21, 2022
He also wants to get rid of that “non-dismissible login pop”.
that’s what Elon told me my job was, and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks
also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the Internet https://t.co/vZbSfEqlfW
— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 22, 2022
For those wondering about the timing of him joining hands with Musk, Techcrunch has the answer. In a report, it said that Hotz considers that some of his own work at Comma.ai is done for the moment.
Moreover, he may also want to again prove his mettle to Musk. It’s left to be seen if Hotz can indeed prove himself to Musk and bring in the transformation or will he too quit before completing the task.
With inputs from agencies
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