Are we the baddies?

George Hotz has spent his career[1] being a "useful idiot" for a series of hypercapitalist techbros, including Zuckerberg in the 2010s and Musk as recently as 2022, so it's somewhat notable that the scales may be falling from his eyes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

Ah I'd never heard of him before

Yeah, he got his fame in the mid-2000s when he found a vulnerability in the Playstation 3 OS and some idiot lawyers at Sony sued him for it. He parlayed that into a cool, anti-corporate hacker persona, and then got hired by the most powerful corporations and people on the planet to try to give their tech companies some cool hacker cred. It's honestly a pretty funny career arc. I don't dislike the guy, he found a way to get his bag, good for him. But he definitely got played by the pros.

Nice try. I worked at Facebook for 9 months and left (before vesting any shares) because I didn't agree with the mission, even back in 2012. I worked at Twitter for 5 weeks and left because I realized nothing was going to change (and the good food went away). I don't regret trying at either, but in revealed preferences, I've spent most of my life writing open source software, even if that's not what attracts most media about me.

I know you think everyone is just trying to "get their bag" and that's the framework you see this in. But I already had more money at 21 than I've spent to date, and not cause I had a lot of money, but cause I don't buy much stuff. I'm sorry you feel played, but don't project that on me.

Haha, no worries, you're good. But come on, you have to admit it's at least a little funny that the famous Sony/iOS/Android hacker geohotz ended up... working for Facebook and then Elon Musk's X, lol.