Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk have revealed that the first employee hired for his electric vehicle company’s Autopilot team was an Indian. Elon Musk has shared videos of an interview on Twitter. It read – “Indian-origin Ashok Elluswamy was the first employee to be recruited for the autopilot team of his first electric vehicle company.”
Elon Musk said that Ashok Illuswamy is the head of Autopilot Engineering (AI). Musk said, “Ashok was the first to be admitted by my tweet, which said that Tesla is starting an Autopilot team.”
Elon Musk has been using social media to recruit employees. Elon Musk said in a tweet that Tesla is looking for Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers who can contribute to finding solutions to problems that directly affect people’s lives on a large scale. Applying for the job was simple, interested candidates were asked to fill in the fields like name, email, exceptional work done in software, hardware, or AI and leave their resume in PDF format.
He said, “Andrej Andrej is the director of Autopilot Engineering – AI, people often give me a lot of credit and give Andrej a lot of credit too. Tesla’s Autopilot AI team is extremely talented. Some of the smartest people in the world are part of this team.”
Before joining Tesla, Indian-origin Ashok Illuswamy was associated with Volkswagen’s Electronics Research Laboratory. Ashok has done his graduation in ‘Electronics and Communication Engineering’ from an engineering college in Chennai. Ashok holds a master’s degree in Robotic Systems Development from Carnegie Malone University in Pennsylvania.
Ashok Illuswamy joined Tesla’s Autopilot team in January 2014 as a software engineer. In June 2016, he became a senior software engineer. After this, he became Senior Staff Software Engineer in September 2017 and Director of Autopilot Software in May 2019. In this way, Ashok has been associated with Tesla for the last 8 years and 1 month.
