Elon Musk Recruits One Of His Enemies To Help With Twitter

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By Monica J. White/Nov. 22, 2022 3:41 pm EST

Elon Musk may have fired thousands of people from Twitter, but he still needs a certain amount of staff in order to keep running the social media site. In a true example of "desperate times call for desperate measures," the billionaire now seems to have turned to hiring new people after many Twitter employees chose to leave or have been fired. This time around, his choice of a new hire is an interesting one, because this cybersecurity expert is someone that Musk is certainly no fan of. Here's what we know about Twitter's latest hire.

First of all, it's worth noting that the situation at Twitter has been rather grim since Elon Musk bought it for a whopping $44 billion, so it's no wonder that the entrepreneur is now more open than ever to hiring some talent. Entire Twitter departments have been shut down, including the public relations department, which means that Twitter doesn't even have a media representative right now other than the CEO himself. Musk often takes to his own Twitter page in order to report new developments or laugh in the face of the avalanche of criticism he, and Twitter itself, have been facing since the acquisition deal went through in late October, 2022.

After Musk axed entire departments and fired a few thousand people with next-to-no notice, he announced that Twitter 2.0 will require the remaining employees to be more "hardcore." He left his staff with an ultimatum — either commit to long hours and sacrifice work-life balance, or resign with three months worth of severance. Reportedly, 1,200 people took the hint and left the company after that. This left Twitter with around 2,300 people, down from 7,500, as reported by Business Insider.

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With Twitter ranks left kind of bare compared to its previous state, the employees left behind are scrambling to keep things running. Whether that was Musk's intention all along or not, it seems that the billionaire is willing to make some exceptions and let bygones be bygones to improve Twitter's chance of succeeding. Despite the chaos all over the media, there are still people who want to work at Twitter, and one such person is George Hotz — who has just started his new job at the social media platform.

Hotz and Musk have some history, so much so that many would consider them enemies. George Hotz is a security expert and hacker. Some of the highlights of his career included iOS jailbreaks and digging deep into the PlayStation 3, but his rise to fame started in 2015, when he reportedly turned down a multi-million dollar bonus and a job offer from Musk (via The Verge). One might wonder why such a lucrative contract would turn into a conflict, but it did.

For starters, the job offer never came to fruition. Many sources report that Hotz said Musk "kept changing the terms," so he declined the job offer at Tesla. At the time, the 26-year-old hacker and developer was saying that his driver assistance systems could outperform Tesla's troubled Autopilot. Musk and Tesla didn't agree with this, so much so that Tesla posted a correction to a Bloomberg article that it didn't even write itself. In the correction, Tesla said: "We think it is 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."

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After Hotz turned down Musk's offer to join Tesla, he went on to found his own company called Comma.ai. Seven years later, the startup can be considered successful; it offers a $1,999 driver assistance system developer kit, and is compatible with plenty of vehicles, unlike Tesla's own systems. Having gotten the startup off the ground, Hotz has recently announced on his GitHub that he would be "taking some time away" from Comma.ai. This leaves the hacker with some free time, and despite their previous differences, it seems that Hotz is supportive of Musk's idea for Twitter 2.0.

After someone posted the email that Musk sent out to Twitter employees, telling them they must either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or quit the company, Hotz showed his approval on Twitter by saying: "This is the attitude that builds incredible things. Let all the people who don't desire greatness leave." He then followed up with the following: "I'm down for a 12-week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF." Although he wasn't addressing Musk directly, the billionaire invited him to talk, and these talks resulted in Hotz joining the Twitter team for the next 12 weeks.

Hotz has announced on Twitter that his job would be to fix the — admittedly less than stellar — search feature over the course of his contract. Seeing as he seems to approve of and agree with Musk's proposed working conditions, which supposedly involve 12-hour days and work on weekends, he might be able to crack the mystery and fulfill the task — provided Twitter stays afloat for that long.