Even Twitter's Intern Just Resigned in Disappointment
"Feel free to ban me."
https://futurism.com/twitter-intern-resigns
Being an intern isn't generally isn't considered a fun — or even
particularly human — role at any company.
But it's hard to imagine a greater entry-level hell than interning at
Elon Musk's Twitter, which has somehow spiraled into greater disarray than ever as a result of Musk's cursed "
Should I step down as head of Twitter?" poll. Clearly it was finally enough for hacker-turned-entrepreneur-turned-Twitter-intern George Hotz, who had been taking an increasingly combative tone against his employer before eventually quitting last night, long before his internship was due to be over.
"Resigned from Twitter today," he
wrote. "Appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there."
To be fair, Hotz isn't your average intern, and his role at Twitter was anything but conventional.
Holtz is a well known self-driving car developer, hacker — he was the first person to hack the iPhone — and coder, who currently helms an autonomous vehicle startup called Comma. Musk even asked him to work at Tesla back in 2015, but Hotz turned the Tesla CEO down to do his own thing. (At the time, Hotz
told Bloomberg that Musk kept "changing the terms" of their agreement.)
History aside, though, Hotz
was inspired by Musk's "hardcore" email to employees, prompting him to offer his reverse-engineering skills to the transitioning platform.
"I'll put my money where my mouth is,"
Hotz tweeted at Musk back in November. "I'm down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF."
"Sure, let's talk,"
the newly-minted Twitter CEO replied.
Hotz has
seemingly been on the Twitter team since. But after weeks of
layoffs, disastrous and half-baked
platform changes, and Musk's ever-growing flirtation with
far right conspiracy theories, Hotz's tweets have taken on an increasingly adversarial tone toward his boss, lobbing broadsides at everything from the
food situation at Twitter to its
development inefficiencies.
His most fiery takes, though, related to Musk's now-reversed decision to ban links to competitors on Twitter.
"Agreed that’s this is an absolutely ridiculous policy," he
wrote after Musk
suspended Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham under the policy, which he
lampooned as the "fastest speed run of 'free speech' ever."
"My bio link has been a link to my Instagram since I created this Twitter," he added. "Feel free to ban me."
His funniest swipe at Musk, though, was probably when he
posted a poll of his own asking whether he should step down as Twitter's intern — though unlike with Musk, a majority of respondents said he should stay.
And since the Twitter thing didn't work out, would Holtz himself be interested in becoming Twitter CEO if Musk actually does step down?
"Hell no," he
wrote,
adding that "there's legit no way I'd ever take that job."
