Twitter has been a sinking ship ever since billionaire jerk Elon Musk took it over in October 2022 (though, arguably, you could say it’s been that way for a while now). The SpaceX and Tesla CEO has been throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, including bringing on noted iPhone jailbreaker and PlayStation 3 hacker, George Hotz, to fix parts of the Bird App. However, Hotz, who joined as an intern for a 12-week period, has resigned from the company after barely one month on the job.
Hotz was hired in November 2022 to iron-out some issues he had with the social media company, such as the nondismissable login popup and the inaccurate search functionality. He never planned to stay at Twitter for the long haul but noted he would “put [his] money where [his] mouth is” and tough out a 12-week internship at Twitter in exchange for “cost of living in San Francisco,” where the company is headquartered. Unfortunately, Hotz didn’t even last one full month, as just a couple of days before hitting that mark, he took to Twitter to announce he quit, effective immediately.
“Resigned from Twitter today,” Hotz tweeted on December 20. “[I] appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make [at the social media company]. Besides, it was sad to see my GitHub withering. Back to coding!”
It’s funny. Around the same time Musk tweeted a poll asking his followers if he should step down as head of Twitter (which he confirmed will happen “as soon as [he] finds someone foolish enough to take the job”), Hotz posed a similar poll to his followers. Hotz asked if he should step down as a Twitter intern, noting he’d “abide by the results” that were largely “No,” with 63.6 percent of responders saying so. Yet here Hotz is, leaving the social media company just as quickly as he joined. He explained to some Twitter users that the reason he quit was because he “expected the environment of a startup and found something very different.” Hotz also said he started reading Twitter’s code and determined “this ain’t it.” That’s a yikes.
Kotaku reached out to Hotz for comment.
In the end, Hotz is still rooting for Musk’s Twitter. He said the maligned CEO has “done a phenomenal job” with the social media company thus far but seems more ready to get back to work on his vehicle automation machine learning startup, Comma AI.