Pranay Pathole meets his 'role model' Elon Musk, duo pose together from Gigafactory in Texas

From dreaming to being like one's ideal, people try hard to acquire skills like their role model. Some aspire to follow the footprints of their parents, some like their friends, teachers, cine stars and so on...

Elon Musk recently met a 23-year-old Pune man Pranay Pathole, whom the the billionaire has been touting as his Twitter friend for a while now. Pathole had always wanted to meet Musk in person, and this year, his dream came true. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO finally met the Pune based IT professional at his Gigafactory in Texas.

Uploading a picture with Musk, Pranay wrote, "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."

To the unversed, Musk and Pranay have been friends on social media since 2018, but their meet and greet happened just this year.

Their friendship reportedly started over Pranay's tweet about Tesla's automatic windscreen wipers. His tweet was addressed to Musk and interestingly, within a few minutes of his post, Musk responded to Pranay. "Fixed in next release," Musk had replied. And since then Musk and Pranay have been interacting regularly.

Four years back, Pathole, who was then an engineering student, was on cloud nine after his "role model" Tesla CEO Elon Musk replied to his tweet on automatic windscreen wipers.

Since then, Pathole, who now works with the Tata Consultancy Services, has been in regular touch with Musk via direct messages (DMs) through Twitter. He had always been aspiring to meet Musk physically and get an opportunity to work with him.

"As I was quite fascinated by Musk, I used to tweet him about technical stuff. In 2018, I tweeted him regarding some auto wiper sensor which will start working once it detects water droplets. Within a few minutes, Musk responded that it (the feature) was being implemented in the next update (of a vehicle manufactured by his company)," Pathole had told PTI.

Pranay, who hails from Pune, has a massive following on Twitter. He has over 1 lakh followers on the microblogging site. His pinned tweet about Mars, to which Musk had responded, has received 28K retweets and some 138K likes and counting.