Every once in a while, Elon Musk is known to respond to his Twitter followers, especially when one of them tweets about him. So when Pune-based machine learning engineer Pranay Pathole tweeted that the tech tycoon learnt as a teenager that “you don't need huge infrastructure resources” to transfer money online, Musk responded to him with a news report on how internships helped him gain experience during his formative years. Pranay Pathole, an assistant systems engineer with Tata Consultancy Services, describes himself as a “sentient machine” on his Twitter profile.
On Tuesday, he tweeted that Elon Musk had "revolutionized the way we transfer money" and asked “crypto experts” to think about what the billionaire entrepreneur had achieved before passing “toxic and hateful” comments about him.
Pathole referred to the Tesla CEO's summer internship stint at the Bank of Nova Scotia, where a young Elon Musk reportedly earned $14 an hour and got to pitch new ideas to his bosses. Musk said in his response he enjoyed working with Peter Nicholson, a top executive there, but the bank did not give him a raise despite him figuring out a lucrative arbitrage opportunity for it.
Pathole's tweets defending Elon Musk come as several crypto investors have criticised the Tesla CEO for making comments against Bitcoin that triggered a downward spiral in valuation of the world's largest digital currency. Elon Musk, who has repeatedly supported Dogecoin in recent months, first said Tesla was suspending payments in Bitcoin over climate concerns and then implied in a Twitter exchange that the electric carmaker has sold or may sell part of its Bitcoin holdings. Then, Musk, in another tweet, had to clarify that Tesla “has not sold” any Bitcoin, but by then Bitcoin was already trading at one of its lowest values in recent months. The cryptocurrency later stabilised.
Elon Musk has often supported cryptocurrencies, once even saying they could become the future currency of the Earth but added he was not sure which one would become or whether there would be multiple digital currencies.
