Original iPhone hacker George Hotz, also known as ‘Geohot’, says he wants to work for Elon Musk’s Twitter.
Hotz is famous for becoming the first person to jailbreak and unlock the modem firmware on the original 2007 iPhone, plus exploiting the PlayStation 3, resulting in Sony suing the hacker (they later settled out of court).
Most recently, he has been working for his self-driving startup, Comma.ai, which he recently stepped away from.
Now, it appears Hotz is ready for another challenge—working on Elon Musk’s next version of Twitter.
On Wednesday, Hotz said, “This is the attitude that builds incredible things. Let all the people who don’t desire greatness leave,” referring to a Musk email to Twitter staff informing those not ready to become “extremely hardcore” to leave the company.
“I’m happy we were able to do this at @comma_ai but in a more understated way. Build a culture where you just sort of don’t fit in if you don’t aspire to excellence,” said Hotz.
“I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’m down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in [San Francisco],” said Hotz. “It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive.”
That statement elicited a reply from Musk, saying, “sure, let’s talk.”
Sure, let’s talk.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 16, 2022
The back and forth continued with Hotz replying, “Cool, my phone number hasn’t changed.” He added, “I’m not the guy if you want long term stability, but I really enjoy diving in to complex codebases and think I could help document and clean up some of those 1000 microservices in 12 weeks. Reverse engineering!”.
Musk informed Twitter employees they have until 5pm ET on Thursday to click “yes” on a link in his email to continue with the company, or “receive three months severance.”
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade,” said Musk’s email.
Hotz later added he doesn’t like remote work and “would go into office every day.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Musk added in a separate Twitter conversation, “people have no idea how fast Twitter will evolve.”
