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How this 23-year-old Indian IT professional became Elon Musk’s ’friend’
Pranay Pathole is currently working as a software developer for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
A random tweet was sent to Elon Musk in 2018 about an issue with Tesla’s automatic windscreen wipers. The tweet was posted by a second-year engineering student Pranay Pathole from Pune, Maharastra. “Fixed in next release”, Musk replied promptly.
Since then Pranay and the wealthiest man on the earth are 'friends' on Twitter. Tesla CEO and Pranay engage and interact regularly on Twitter.
Pranay Pathole is currently working as a software developer for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). He has over 1 lakh followers on Twitter. His pinned tweet about Mars, to which Musk had responded, has received 28K retweets and some 138K likes. His GitHub profile describes him as “Machine learning engineer”, “Nerding out about Space and Rockets on Twitter.”
In an interview with Hindustan Times, Pranay says, “When Elon responded to me for the first time, that was the highlight of my life. But now my interactions with him have become very casual. We talk back and forth through Direct Messages (DMs) on Twitter.”
Describing Tesla CEO as ‘super friendly’, Pranay says Musk is humble and has no airs about his status. He also adds Musk is very active on Twitter and gets responses within minutes whenever he messages him.
"It doesn’t feel like you are interacting with the world’s richest person. To me, it feels like you are just hanging out with another buddy of yours," he adds.
“Our DM conversations range from topics like making life multi planetary, why going to Mars is very essential for the core survival of humanity. We have also spoken about his past, his upbringing. He told me about how he flew from South Africa to Canada with just 2,000 dollars, and a suitcase full of books.”
Pranay also tells why he is a Musk fan, “The biggest reason that I am such a huge fan of Elon Musk is because he trusts and believes in his own reasoning over conventional wisdom.”
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First Published:16 Mar 2022, 01:19 PM IST
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