George ”Geohot” Hotz rose to prominence back in 2008 by jailbreaking iPhones and, more notably, hacking PlayStation 3 consoles. But the task at hand was much bigger when Elon Musk called him for help. The billionaire CEO reportedly offered him a multimillion long-term contract for Hotz to join Tesla, after he previously led a company called Comma AI into becoming Tesla’s main rival in driver-assist technologies. Instead, Hotz offered his services to Elon on a 12-week internship at Twitter and joined the social media giant in November only to quit even before the said period of time is over.

Elon Musk has tried everything to turn around Twitter after buying it. Despite coming in to iron out some issues like non-dismissable login popups and inaccurate search features that would require familiarity with the code, George Hotz never planned on staying with Twitter for the long haul. A short stay in San Francisco where the company is headquartered and the publicity that comes with ”fixing” Twitter is all he wanted.

But it turns out, that 12-week internship was 8 weeks too many for the talented software engineer.  In just shy of a month of reading Twitter’s code, George Hotz declared that ”this ain’t it” in a follow-up tweet to his announcement. He would also go on to mention one of the main reasons for his resignation was him ”expecting the environment of a startup and found something very different”.

Between reheated uber eats food, a questionable commitment to free speech, existing office politics, and a push for features, I was like, there's nothing substantial I can do here.

Elon has management skills at a level far beyond mine. I know how to run a 20 person eng team.

— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) December 22, 2022

Following in the footsteps of his now-former employer, Hotz posted a poll on Twitter about his future. Despite a whopping 63.6% of his respondents voting no and him also claiming to “abide by the results”, here we are.

Hotz is leaving the social media giant as soon as he joined it, sparking a major talking point. What’s in store for Twitter in the near future? Who can fix this mess, and who will Elon Musk entrust with this huge responsibility, especially now that he's on his way out?

For what it's worth, Hotz finished off by saying he's still rooting for Musk’s vision for Twitter. According to Hotz, the maligned CEO has ”done a phenomenal job” given the situation.