Elon Musk’s Twitter friendship with Indian superfan

Aug 24, 2022

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PUNE: Not many individuals can boast of getting candid conversations about planetary conquest with Elon Musk, however for software program engineer Pranay Pathole, a pleasant chat with the world’s richest man is only a tweet away.
Their unlikely on-line friendship has blossomed since Pathole was a young person, with the mercurial billionaire responding to him over lots of of tweets and personal messages with headline-making firm updates and even life recommendation.
This week, the 2 lastly met head to head, when Pathole travelled to america — his first journey abroad — to start a grasp’s diploma there in enterprise analytics.
“He’s tremendous real. Like, manner down-to-earth. He is humble,” the 23-year-old advised AFP beforehand. “The best way he takes his time to answer me… simply exhibits.”
Musk is a prolific person of Twitter, usually posting greater than 30 occasions a day to his 103 million followers.
But it surely stays a thriller why the SpaceX and Tesla boss, with a web value of $266 billion, maintains common contact with the younger Indian.
“To be very sincere, I don’t know. I feel he have to be like, actually intrigued by my questions,” Pathole advised AFP from his mother and father’ upper-middle-class house within the western metropolis of Pune.
Pathole’s account is one in all solely a small handful that the billionaire regularly replies to — a mean of as soon as each two days, primarily based on Musk’s public Twitter posts for the reason that begin of 2020.
The primary time Musk responded to him was in 2018 when Pathole, then aged 19, identified a flaw in Tesla’s computerized windshield wipers.
“Mounted in subsequent launch,” Musk replied, with Tesla addressing the difficulty in a subsequent software program replace.
His mom and father celebrated by taking him out to dinner that evening.
“I used to be blown away, to be very sincere,” Pathole says. “I took a number of screenshots of it and simply by no means needed the day to finish.”
Their later non-public chats — every day at first — lined “busting myths” about Musk’s previous and discussions about why colonising different planets is “important”, Pathole says.
“I used to ask him dumb questions, foolish questions. And he used to take his time to answer to me.”
The time distinction between the US and India has achieved little to hamper the four-year digital friendship.
“I do not suppose he sleeps that usually. As a result of he is on Twitter, like, the vast majority of the time,” Pathole says.
Pathole says interactions with Musk have turn into “rather more informal” through the years, and he now not rushes to share them with family and friends.
“Elon is similar man in his public persona in addition to in his non-public,” he says.
Musk’s candid, irreverent and infrequently cryptic tweets have sparked wild inventory and cryptocurrency value swings, inviting scrutiny by US regulators.
The billionaire investor can also be locked in a high-stakes authorized battle with Twitter itself over his effort to stroll away from an settlement to purchase the corporate, with the trial set to start in October.
However Pathole rejects ideas that the billionaire acts with malice.
“I do not suppose that he is a troll,” Pathole says. “He is an unpredictable man.”
Recruited straight out of engineering faculty to work at Tata Consultancy Companies, India’s greatest IT agency, Pathole says he was “notorious” for moving into hassle in school — a trait he says helps him higher perceive Musk.
Having travelled to the US final week — bearing sweets for Musk — he hopes to not solely earn his diploma on the College of Texas at Dallas however achieve work expertise at a US firm, together with any of Musk’s.
“I need to get a job at Tesla alone advantage. It is not like I would like any favours. It might be good if he might interview me,” Pathole says.
After their assembly, Pathole tweeted an image of the pair, which Musk “preferred”.
Wearing a black T-shirt within the type of his idol, Pathole can clarify the intricacies of reusable rocket boosters and make a philosophical case for house exploration with equal ease.
Typically, he quotes the billionaire entrepreneur’s feedback verbatim.
“Reside on Earth and die on Mars: that could be a philosophy that all of us share,” Pathole says, including that he desires to develop previous and die with the “purple mud of Mars” on his toes.
Pathole has amassed a six-digit Twitter following, including extra each time Musk mentions him in a tweet.
Even offline, Musk is a frequent subject of dinner-table dialog with Pathole’s household and mates.
“Elon is like our household good friend,” jokes Pranay’s father Prashant, a media marketing consultant, including that he and his spouse Pallavi, a homemaker, have been happy with their son’s ardour.
“If he follows Elon Musk, if he desires to calm down on Mars, we do not thoughts.”



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