First to hack into iPhone, tech prodigy who trolled Tesla, joins Elon Musk at Twitter

It seems that Elon Musk recognises game when he sees it. While Musk may come across as a brash troll at times, the Tesla and Twitter CEO surely respects tech skills and people who demonstrate their technical prowess and know what they are doing.

Elon Musk has hired George Hotz, a notable engineer who made a name for himself for being one of the very first people to hack into an iPhone. Hotz is a notable security hacker who, in the past, turned down a job at Tesla working on its driver-assistance technology.

One of the issues that Musk had spotted with Twitter was how jarring the search options on the platform operated. This is a sentiment that was shared by a lot of programmers, including Hotz. Hotz, then suggested what he would do to remedy this and solve the search issue that users face with Twitter.

Hotz even offered to join Twitter as an intern under Musk, which Musk accepted.

Sure, let’s talk.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 16, 2022

The internship came about after Hotz expressed support for Musk’s “extremely hardcore” ultimatum to Twitter’s employees, which demanded that they work “long hours at high intensity” or else depart the company. Hotz said that “this is the attitude that builds incredible things” and that he’d be willing to do an internship at the company. “Sure, let’s talk,” was Musk’s response.

Apart from hacking into an iPhone and the consequent battles with Apple, Hotz gained notoriety for founding Comma.ai, an advanced driver assistance company that creates autonomous driving solutions that can be retrofitted into older cars as well. Back then, Tesla said of Hotz’ ideas about autonomous driving as “extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles.”

Evidently, Tesla had earlier offered to hire Hotz before he founded Comma.ai, to work on Tesla autonomous driving. However, he rejected the offer because Musk, as per Hotz, kept changing the deal. Hotz, when rejecting Tesla’s final offer, famously told Musk, “I appreciate the offer, but like I’ve said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.” At the time, Mobileye was the company supplying some of the technology Tesla used in its Autopilot system.

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