George “Geohot” Hotz is known in the tech industry for his exploits from the PlayStation 3 days. The hacker was the first person to break the PS3’s security. He was hired by Elon Musk to fix Twitter. Elon Musk wants to save his new toy and has decided to hire George “Geohot” Hotz, whom he believes will be able to fix the Twitter search function, among other things. The hacker has 12 weeks to complete his task.
This job will be a win-win for both parties since Hotz will presumably be well-paid for his work and Musk will remove one more problem from the many that he has identified within his social network. However, Musk will also remove an old thorn from his head.
A few years ago, after ending an amicable settlement with Sony over the PS3 hacking case, Hotz announced that he would set up his own company, Comma AI, which would focus on bringing a driver assistance system to life and would directly compete with Tesla’s autopilot technology.
This daring, as expected, caught the attention of Elon Musk, but it was not until a few weeks ago when Hotz announced that he would leave his position to focus on other things that Musk decided to put a million-dollar offer on the table to work at Tesla that he could not refuse. And he refused.
This unexpected rudeness seems to have not ended too well between the two, who supposedly ended up sparking. But everything changed recently when Elon Musk invited him to talk about the situation on Twitter. Thus was born the temporary work agreement.
At the very least, Hotz follows the Silicon Valley custom of attempting to make things better than the typical person doesn’t care about. “If I simply do away with the pop-up, I nonetheless think of my internship as a win,” Hotz tweeted. “I’ve got a Chrome extension on my laptop computer to stop it.”