He doesn't strike me as the type of person to lie (except when trolling). His reputation is solid enough that I'm sure he's had discussions with people in the space.
I remember watching a live stream [1] of him going through Twitter engineering articles and trying to reverse engineer the Twitter frontend and backend, and he clearly had absolutely no clue of how anything remotely related to the web works.
He was just clicking around compulsively, jumping between stuff randomly without even reading it, while not understanding what he was looking at. I have no idea how he's successful in tech, judging from what I saw there.
> I have no idea how he's successful in tech, judging from what I saw there.
I think judging only from what you saw there is the issue. If you look somewhere like Wikipedia [0], you'll see he was the first person to jailbreak the iPhone, the first person to achieve hypervisor access to the PS3's CPU, he took first place in several notable CTFs (at least one time as a one-person team), he worked on Google's Project Zero team (and created a debugger called QIRA while he was there), creating comma.ai, and the list goes on.
Well he picked the right problem at the time which was (and still is!) search. I was really looking forward to some progress on this and then he deleted tweets and dropped off the system. I would love to see a podcast of him talking about that & fyi @realGeorgeHotz is back on it now to promote Tiny grad/box/corp.
As someone who has spent 20+ years working in large companies you can spot developers like him a mile away i.e. the sort of behaviour you see with skilled but arrogant grads/interns.
The right approach when you're new is to quietly pick a simple problem away from the core services where you can learn the processes and polices needed to get something into Production. More so when you're in a company that is undergoing a brain drain.
Then you can progressively move to solving more demanding and critical issues.
Large companies normally (unlike Twitter) have achieved strong product market fit and are all about tweaks that deliver marginal revenue. Given that they already have a big slice of the market, the multiplier on marginal revenue makes what you're doing worthwhile.
"Rocking the boat" is more likely than not to make things worse.
a) It is valued at about a 1/4 of what it was purchased at.
b) Twitter Blue has generated an irrelevant amount of revenue and churn is increasing [1].
c) Roadmap looks poor. Video is a terrible direction where only Google, Amazon, TikTok etc have been able to make the numbers work and that's because it is subsidised through other revenue sources. Payments is DOA given Twitter's inability to comply with existing regulations let alone how difficult KYC/AML is to manage.
d) Regulatory and legal risk increases by the day. Lawsuits continue to pile up and EU/FTC are hovering around as Twitter is not in compliance with previous agreements.
e) Brand safety continues to be a huge challenge that isn't solvable without effectively going back to what Twitter was previously.
f) BlueSky and Instagram are both releasing competitor apps to the broader public in the coming months. The market simply won't sustain this many text-based social media apps.
a) Meta had similar swings of over 3x between a 2021 high and a 2022 low. We can only guess what Twitter would be worth today if the stock was floated, but it isn’t. Substituting market valuations with our personal beliefs isn’t interesting.
b) Every social media company has a well populated graveyard of failed experiments behind them.
c) Opinion.
d) Business as usual for every social media company since the dawn of time.
e) Opinion. And advertiser behaviour suggests otherwise.
f) History is littered with new entrants which fail to unseat the incumbent. It does happen, but it’s statistically rare.
Except for data points like Twitter Blue subscribers, number of active lawsuits, failed video startups etc.
As well as comments from Musk himself about the decline in the value of Twitter and from advertisers themselves about the challenges around brand safety.
g) bot account traffic has gone through the roof after constraints were removed. Follows from random bots occur multiple times a day on accounts with a couple dozen followers
h) the tweets served are no longer weighted towards followers but instead whoever paid for blue checks
i) accounting on views is entirely wrong with a tweet registering a billion views
His biggest issue was trying to convince the remaining engineers and Elon that a refactor was more promising than continuing to build on the layers of spaghetti code that runs twitter.
I don't disagree with him, it's just clear that he didn't understand how dire the financial situation was and that even a progressive refactor starting with the most basic features would take considerable engineering hours and money.
He added some code to give himself tons of it and didn't report it to anyone, dismissed it as a joke or something when it was found and then disappeared after hyping the project. Sound familiar?
To me he joins the ranks of the most basic shady crypto types.
