Indian origin Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s autopilot director was hired thru Musk’s tweet

Team Udayavani, Jan 6, 2022, 1:28 PM IST

New Delhi/San Francisco: A recent tweet by Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who is known for his unconventional approach towards business and social media brought an Indian origin engineer to the limelight.

On December 29 Musk tweeted that Ashok Elluswamy, who is currently the head of the Autopilot Engineering, was the first employee to be hired for Tesla’s Autopilot team way back in 2015.

In 2015, Musk had tweeted about starting Tesla’s auto pilot team and had invited people to apply for the role.

“I tweeted that Tesla is about to launch an auto pilot team. Through that tweet, Ashok was the first to be selected in the auto pilot team,” Musk said in a tweet.

“Ashok is actually the head of Autopilot engineering. Andrej is director of AI; People often give me too much credit & give Andrej too much credit. The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. Some of the smartest people in the world,” he said.

Prior to joining Tesla, Ashok was associated with WABCO Vehicle Control System and Volkswagon Electronic Research Lab.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai and a Master’s degree in Robotics System Development from Carnegie Mellon University.

As per a LinkedIn endorsement from Elluswamy’s professor at CMU, John Dalon, he was one of the top students and showed initiative in learning a wide variety of topics.

Musk often uses his social media for hiring personnel. Recently he tweeted that Tesla is looking for hardcore Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers who care about solving problems that directly affect people’s lives in a major way.

“As always, Tesla is looking for hardcore AI engineers who care about solving problems that directly affect people’s lives in a major way,” Musk tweeted along with a link to apply for the job.

Interested candidates can apply by filling in fields like name, email, exceptional work done in software, hardware or AI, dropping their resume in the PDF format and hitting the Apply option.