George Hotz offered his services to Twitter for free back in November. It was a peculiar turn of events seeing as he didn't see eye-to-eye with Elon Musk before. He is more known as "geohot," the person who managed to jailbreak the PS3.
Didn't Finish His Term
Originally, he was supposed to work on the platform for 12 weeks. However, he only stayed with the company for five and a half weeks. Following in his boss' footsteps, he also tweeted a poll days before his resignation on whether he should leave Twitter or not.
Unlike Musk, the poll came out with a relatively positive outcome. The majority of the votes point to users not wanting Hotz to step down. Obviously, Hotz did not follow the poll's results, as he announced his departure from the platform.
In his tweet, he said that he resigned from Twitter. Hotz expressed that he appreciated the opportunity, but he believe that there wasn't any real impact he can make for Twitter. He added that he also wanted to turn his attention back to his GitHub and code.
It may also be because of Twitter's new rule where users can't link to Twitter's competitor sites like Instagram and Facebook. As mentioned in The Verge, he wasn't too happy with the policy. Regardless, he said that he was still rooting for Musk's vision for Twitter 2.0.
How He Got the Internship
In case you didn't hear about his employment, he actually got it because of some common ground with the Tesla CEO. This was a big deal considering that Musk and Hotz had a disagreement regarding the latter's terms of employment.
Later on, Hotz even founded a company called Comma AI, which became a competitor to Tesla's autopilot system. But then, Hotz agreed with Musk's idea to lay off employees who did not want to commit to the "hardcore" work that Twitter demands, as mentioned in Kotaku.
Quoting a tweet that contained Musk's email to his staff about the working conditions, Hotz expressed that it was the kind of attitude that would build incredible things. He added that Musk should let the people who don't desire greatness leave.
When a user pointed out that it was too much, he offered his services without pay, except for living expenses in San Francisco where Twitter's headquarters was based. Musk accepted his offer and he started working for Twitter on November 18th.
He was tasked with fixing Twitter search, along with the popup that users see when they scroll through Twitter without logging in. He made god with his promise since the popup no longer appears, although the jury is still out with the Twitter search.
George Hotz did say in a tweet that if he got rid of the popup, he would already consider his internship a win. It also reminded him of the guy who got employed by Apple, made Wallet delete expired boarding passes, and then quit the following week.
In a way, it foreshadowed his departure from the company, seeing as he fixed what he set out to fix, and then resigned after.
