CEG alumnus Elluswamy becomes 1st Tesla Autopilot staff picked through Musk’s tweet

HOUSTON: Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk, who has been using social media to recruit people, has disclosed that Indian-origin Ashok Elluswamy was the first employee to be hired for his electric vehicle company's Autopilot team.

Elluswamy was actually the first employee to be hired for Tesla's Autopilot team, with Musk actually using Twitter to ask people to apply for the role back in 2015.

"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 was the first person recruited from my tweet saying that Tesla is starting an Autopilot team!” Musk said in a tweet in reply to a video of his interview.

He said that Ashok is actually the head of Autopilot engineering. "Andrej is director of AI; People often give me too much credit and give Andrej too much credit. The Tesla Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. Some of the smartest people in the world,” he said. Before joining Tesla, Elluswamy was associated with Volkswagen Electronic Research Lab and WABCO Vehicle Control System. 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 recently 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. The job application was simple with interested candidates were asked to fill fields like name, email, exceptional work done in software, hardware or AI and drop their resume in the PDF format.