Elon Musk meets Pranay Pathole, his 24-year-old Twitter friend from India

• Pranay Pathole, a 24-year-old IT professional from India met the world’s richest man in Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory.
  
• Musk and Pathole have been Twitter buds since 2018.
  
• Post meet, Pathole describes Musk as “humble and down-to-earth person”.
  

We all have a plethora of virtual friends, but is the world’s richest man on our list? It was a dream come true for Pranay Pathole, the 24-year-old IT professional from Pune, India, who on Monday tweeted about meeting his idol Elon Musk in Tesla’s Texas factory. Musk and Pathole have been friends since 2018, albeit on Twitter.

These friends talk about multiplantery travel, aliens, Mars, electric cars and all things rocket science.

On Monday, Pathole uploaded a picture capturing the moment he met his idol, Musk.

Celebrating the occasion, Pathole tweeted, “It was so great meeting you @elonmusk at the Gigafactory Texas. Never seen such a humble and down-to-earth person. You're an inspiration to the millions.”

The camaraderie began in 2018 when Pathole, a second year-engineering student in Pune, tweeted to Elon Musk about issues with automatic window wipers in a Tesla car. Musk promptly replied saying he would attend to the issue.

The two have since kept in touch, with Pathole amassing over 180k followers, thanks largely to the regular back and forth between them.

Most recently, Pathole tweeted about being able to watch the surface of Mars, captured by Tesla’s Curiosity Rover. Replying to Pathole’s tweet, Elon Musk said, “We should bring life to Mars. Mars looks amazing.”

Pathole’s post garnered 7.2 million views with over 26.7k retweets.

The two Twitter pals have even swapped book recommendations and have had other discussions on Twitter. On August 2, Pathole asked Elon if he had read Nick Bostrom’s paper “Astronomical Waste” and tweeted, “This essentially states that every second we delay expanding into space, we lose at least one hundred trillion potential human lives that could have lived.”

Musk’s prompt response to his Indian twitter buddy –“That estimate seems high, but the point is valid.”

Pathole’s LinkedIn profile says that he is a software developer for Tata Consultancy Services and is getting his Masters Degree from the University of Texas in Dallas. In his GitHub profile, Pathole describes himself as a “machine learner” who is “nerding out about Space and rockets on Twitter''.

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