Elon Musk has brought on George Hotz to serve as a Twitter intern for the next three months. Hotz made a name for himself more than a decade ago when he hacked a PlayStation 3 and published exploit information. That led to a lawsuit from Sony, but the two parties settled when Hotz agreed to cease doing so further. These days, Hotz is a software engineer working on vehicle automation, but he recently took on an unpaid internship with Twitter. Earlier this month, Hotz decried employees that refused to sign Elon’s “extremely hardcore” declaration for Twitter 2.0, stating that he would work 12 unpaid weeks in exchange for San Francisco living expenses.
Musk publicly accepted the offer, and Hotz is apparently working on two projects for the company: fixing Twitter’s search function and “trying to get rid of the nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit.” It remains to be seen how this will all go, but Hotz has already taken some heat on Twitter for trying to crowdsource the work from other users. Whether or not he’ll succeed during his time with the company remains to be seen.
Things at Twitter have been a mess since Musk took over the company. The CEO spent $44 billion to purchase Twitter and has come across desperate to recoup his investment. The social media platform has seen massive layoffs and a proposed Twitter Blue change that allowed verified users to impersonate companies. Those impersonators have led to several advertisers abandoning Twitter, and an overall lack of confidence in the company’s current direction. Reports last week suggested that a number of remaining employees are concerned Twitter could end up shutting down completely.
