I've really soured on him when he literally went "I'm going to fix twitter search, hire me elon" and then went to public saying "Hey, want an internship? Fix it, and then MIT license your code(so he could use it lol), and maybe we can talk - oh btw I have no real authority to give anyone an internship."
He might be a brilliant programmer and problem solver, but that incident left a very sour "Grifter" vibes.
His work for jailbreaking/actually being able to own the devices we pay for back in the iPhone+PS3 days was and is still inspiring, but I think being so smart and encountering so much bullshit in his life kind of led him to the 'rockstar coder I know better than you regardless of domain' personality, and that leaves him both a bit grating and underquipped to drive consensus. He's still a great wrench to throw into the bullshit machine though, and the guy is smarter and more accomplished with computers than I'm ever likely to be.
Your algorithm for "who is a grifter" is buggy. You can tell someone is not a grifter based on what code they ship, not what words they say ("Cypherpunks write code" being the mantra).
Failure doesn't prove someone is a grifter, btw. Not acknowledging failure is what makes one a grifter. A grifter would continue to draw a Twitter salary without actually fixing anything and were many such cases before Musk took over! Instead, Hotz quit upon realizing that he couldn't do what he said and publicly acknowledged that he couldn't fix Twitter search.
This is also why his companies/projects have bounties instead of "internships". Their code is open source and actually writing code is a simple filter that eliminates people who don't write code but are good at _saying_ that they will. By not even guaranteeing a paid internship in exchange for a pull request, he ensures a contributor's incentives are aligned with improving the technology as opposed to gaming a hiring process. And he pays cash for bounties so you can accurately evaluate whether it's worth your time to contribute.
In other words, he learned from his failure at Twitter that if Twitter's code had been open he would have been able to make an accurate assessment of whether he could fix it by actually submitting a PR!
Is this why he deleted all instances of the said tweet?
Feels like the usual trend of someone actually skilled in one specific thing (hacking) letting the social media notoriety get to his head and thinking he's just as much of a genius at everything else.