Explained: Who is George Hotz, the iPhone hacker, hired by Elon Musk to fix Twitter search?

Transforming Twitter isn’t an easy task, but it’s one that billionaire Elon Musk has taken on for himself.

Since the Tesla and SpaceX founder bought the social media website for a whopping $44 billion at the end of October, the company has seen radical changes — around 4,700 staff have either quit or been fired, advertisers are fleeing the platform and people from all walks of life have been incessantly criticising Musk.

Amid all this chaos and massive churn in the company, Elon Musk has brought in the most unlikely of people, George Hotz, the noted iPhone hacker and considered by many to be Musk’s rival, for a 12-week internship stint to fix Twitter’s search feature, as well as to remove the prompt that prevents you from browsing the service on the web without logging in.

Unsurprisingly, the hire came about on Twitter itself. The internship offer came about when the 33-year-old Hotz extended his support to Musk when he asked Twitter employees to be ‘hardcore or quit’.

This is the attitude that builds incredible things. Let all the people who don’t desire greatness leave. https://t.co/Q3do2tjX4f

— George Hotz