Who is Lex Fridman? Elon Musk's friend who wants to work for free as Twitter head

Elon Musk is planning to step down as Twitter CEO, at least, that’s what he promised his Twitter followers. On Monday, the billionaire took a Twitter Poll to decide if he should continue to head Twitter or quit being at the helm of the social media company. The poll lasted for a few hours with clear results showing that Twitterati wanted him to quit Twitter as the CEO. What Elon does after the poll is up to him but there are takers for the position of CEO and some are even willing to do it for free.    Lex Fridman, a podcaster and MIT research scientist who has hosted Elon Musk on his show, pitched an idea to Elon Musk. He said, “Let me run Twitter for a bit. No salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world. Just offering my help in the unlikely case it's useful.”  

  Fridman got a quick response from Elon Musk and as expected, he strongly discouraged Fridman by saying, “You must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”   Lex Fridman responded by saying, “Yes. We'll turn it around.”   The conversation didn’t go any further, at least not on the public forum.   But who is Lex Fridman?   Going by his Twitter Bio, Fridman is a podcaster, a Research Scientist at MIT and he’s ‘interested in robots and humans’.   Fridman’s official website says he is an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at “MIT and beyond”.   Fridman has hosted Elon Musk on his podcast multiple times with the last appearance in December 2021. Other than Musk, he has hosted guests like Jack Dorsey, Richard Dawkins, Leonard Susskind, Noam Chomsky, Eric Weinstein, Roger Penrose and Stephen Wolfram. 

Fridman seems to be one of the people on Twitter who interact with Musk regularly. He also shares a lot of his beliefs with the billionaire. Musk has also confirmed that he will be attending Fridman's podcast next week.  

What is Musk planning? Musk has not stepped down from his position as Twitter CEO so far. However, he had categorically said he would abide by the poll results. The poll showed that 57.5 per cent of the responders wanted him to step down and the rest 42.5 per cent said ‘no’.