“Chief Twit” Elon Musk lost it when grilled about Twitter’s software engineering and coding on Tuesday night, calling the questioner a “jackass” for pressing for specific details.
During a Twitter Space hosted by renowned hacker George Hotz, who had resigned from Twitter earlier in the day, Musk said that Twitter would need to do a “total rewrite of the whole thing” if it wanted to have a “really high velocity,” prompting Netflix engineer Ian Brown to interrupt with some pointed questions. Brown had previously worked at Twitter for more than 8 years before leaving in Oct. 2021.
“Wait, seriously, a total rewrite? That’s your prediction for velocity?” Brown wondered.
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“Yeah,” Musk quickly replied.
“Well, when you say a total rewrite, you mean starting with the skeleton?” Hotz interjected. “Or a bunch of engineers sit down with a whiteboard and say, ‘What is Twitter?’ Revolution or reform?”
Musk, after hemming and hawing for a few seconds, eventually said that “you either needed to amend the crazy stack that exists or rewrite it,” Brown jumped in again to ask the Tesla founder what he explicitly meant and whether he could “break it down.”
Following an awkward silence, Musk questioned whether Brown had “seen George’s diagram,” causing the Netflix employee to break out in laughter.
“Are you—who are you?!” an increasingly flustered Musk shot back.
“What do you mean who am I? I don’t know! You gave me the fucking mic!” Brown retorted. Hotz, meanwhile, acknowledged that he gave Brown the opportunity to speak while calling for it to be “more civil” in his Space.
“I mean, man, you’re in charge of the servers and the programming and whatever,” Brown continued. “What is the stack, Elon? Take me from top to bottom. What does the stack look like right now? What’s so crazy about it? What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!”
Rather than answer Brown’s questions, Musk instead resorted to ad hominem attacks.
“Amazing! You’re a jackass!” the Twitter CEO fumed.
“Haha, ok! I got no credibility here, buddy,” Brown fired back before Hotz pulled the plug on his mic.
“Good! What a moron,” Musk added, getting in the final word.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Brown for comment.
Musk, who also likened Twitter to a plane crash on Tuesday night to justify “crazy” cost-cutting, recently said he would step down as the site’s CEO once he finds someone “foolish enough to take the job.” At the same time, Musk has claimed he’ll stay on to head up Twitter’s software and servers teams.
Since buying the company for $44 billion in October, Musk’s rocky reign at Twitter has been marked by chaos, hypocrisy, and heartburn for investors in his other businesses.
