Musk Follow Tracker — Issue #16: The Jailbreaker, the CDN King, and the NYSE President

On May 28–29 UTC, Elon Musk's following list moved faster than any single day since the six-follow burst of Issue #12. The most-discussed follow — @__tinygrad__, George Hotz's anti-NVIDIA compute company — generated nearly 60,000 views on BigTechAlert within hours. By the time @lynnmartin (Lynn Martin, President of the New York Stock Exchange) landed 24 hours later, the session had traced a clean arc: AI compute independence at one end, SpaceX IPO venue relationship at the other.

At 22:05 UTC on May 28, BigTechAlert logged that Musk followed @__tinygrad__ — the official account for the tiny corp, the San Diego AI compute company founded by George Hotz (universally known as "geohot").1

This was the highest-engagement BigTechAlert Musk-follow alert this cycle: 624 likes and nearly 59,000 views. By comparison, most Musk follow alerts get under 10,000 views. The market read the signal immediately.

Hotz jailbroke the original iPhone at 17, later broke the PS3's "unhackable" hardware encryption, and in 2022 spent roughly four weeks at Twitter at Musk's personal invitation to fix X's broken search. He has since put his full energy into tinygrad — a minimalist, open-source deep learning framework he started in 2020 with a stated goal: "to commoditize the petaflop." The thesis is blunt: NVIDIA built a $3 trillion empire on CUDA lock-in, and tinygrad aims to run on AMD or any hardware without it.2

By 2026 the company has moved from framework to hardware. The tinybox lineup — starting at $15K for a local AI training/inference workstation — has expanded to tinybox pro with NVIDIA RTX 6000 Blackwell (768 GB RAM) options, priced at $45K for the 5090-based green config. In April 2026, Apple officially approved tiny corp's TinyGPU driver extension, enabling all Apple Silicon Macs to attach NVIDIA or AMD eGPUs via Thunderbolt for the first time since 2020. Hotz also won a shouting match with Tenstorrent: tinygrad publicly offered to run their chips on MLPerf for $10M if Tenstorrent would just show up.3

xAI is burning an estimated $1B/month in compute pre-IPO. The Memphis facility controversy (environmental pushback on the natural gas generators powering it) adds political exposure to the infrastructure dependency. Musk following tinygrad's corporate account is a legible signal that the AMD/non-NVIDIA compute stack is at minimum on his radar — and at most, that he's evaluating alternatives to NVIDIA dependency at the inference layer.

Hotz himself has been openly dismissive of AI hype while simultaneously shipping faster than most AI infra companies. He called AI agents "the most expensive mistake in software development" after six months of testing on tinygrad's own codebase, and said "it's just Moore's Law and a bubble, there's no singularity" in a post that got 57K views in May.4 That kind of anti-orthodoxy, coming from someone who actually ships hardware, is exactly the profile Musk tends to gravitate toward.

At 02:18 UTC May 29, Musk followed @eastdakota — Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare (NYSE: NET), 191K followers.5

The timing is not coincidental. At 12:01 UTC on May 28 — roughly 14 hours before the follow — Prince posted: "There's a ton of headroom to better optimize AI training and inference." That tweet pulled 287K views and 97 retweets.6

Prince has been running Cloudflare's AI positioning hard in recent weeks. The same day, he RTed the launch of Cloudflare AI Gateway adding Claude Opus 4.8 support, and announced Cloudflare@OCI — a new partnership bringing Cloudflare's network into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.7 He also RTed a viral thread showing a startup cutting its Vercel bill from $25K/month to $2K by switching to Cloudflare — a post that got 222K views.8

Strategic read: Cloudflare's edge network runs across 330+ cities globally. For xAI's Grok inference at scale, Cloudflare's AI Workers platform (which supports model routing, AI Gateway, and edge inference) would offer a fundamentally different cost structure than centralized GPU farms. Prince's "headroom in AI inference optimization" post lands squarely in the problem Hotz's tinygrad is also attacking from the hardware side. Musk following both in the same 25-hour window suggests he's assembling a mental model of the compute stack — software independence (tinygrad) and network distribution (Cloudflare) — rather than just doing a random follow spree.

There's also a secondary context: on May 27, Cloudflare Radar confirmed partial internet restoration in Iran after a nearly three-month shutdown. Prince retweeted it. Starlink is deployed in the Iran theater, where SpaceX's Starlink pricing became a Reuters flashpoint last week (Issue #15, Sean Parnell follow). The Cloudflare/Iran internet connectivity data is a signal that Prince tracks geopolitically relevant internet access in ways that intersect Starlink's domain.

At 22:49 UTC May 29, Musk followed @lynnmartin — Lynn Martin, President of the New York Stock Exchange (Intercontinental Exchange / ICE subsidiary), 4.3K followers.9

Lynn Martin has held the NYSE presidency since 2022. The IPO context here is direct: SpaceX is expected to list on the NYSE under the ticker SPCX, with the price range set to publish June 1–5, roadshow June 8, and the listing around June 12. Musk is following the president of the exchange that will host the most anticipated IPO of 2026, 13 days before the roadshow starts.

Martin has been active. On May 14 she posted that she was part of the US business delegation joining President Trump's state visit with President Xi in Geneva — representing NYSE and ICE.10 On May 28 she hosted the Fortune Most Powerful Women list celebration at 11 Wall Street — NYSE's trading floor as flagship venue.11 And in May 2026 she hosted NASA's Artemis II crew at the NYSE trading floor — the same crew that just completed humanity's first lunar flyby since 1972.

The SpaceX NASA relationship (Starship, crew transport, Artemis support) plus the Artemis II NYSE bell-ringing moment creates a direct link between Martin's professional calendar and Musk's empire. This follow was almost certainly not spontaneous — it is pre-roadshow relationship building.

At 22:39 UTC May 29, Musk re-followed @ianmiles — Ian Miles Cheong, the Malaysian-born right-wing commentator based in Dubai, 1.26M followers.12

This is a direct reversal of Issue #14, where Musk unfollowed Cheong on May 26 UTC — the same day X's product head Nikita Bier publicly called out content aggregators for content theft, and Mario Nawfal's creator revenue reportedly dropped 90%. Cheong runs a similar aggregation model.

The three-day reversal is notable. Either the aggregator crackdown was more surgical than the initial unfollow implied, Musk received pushback on the move, or Cheong's May 29 coverage of a specific story prompted re-engagement. The most likely candidate: on May 29, Cheong published a detailed post on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploding on the pad at Cape Canaveral during a routine engine test — destroying the vehicle and the pad simultaneously.13 That story directly benefits SpaceX: Blue Origin's 24 Amazon LEO launches are now frozen, and the BE-4 engine implicated is also used on ULA's Vulcan. Cheong's coverage of Blue Origin's catastrophic failure is the kind of content Musk would find signal-positive.

BigTechAlert logged a fourth follow at 04:24 UTC May 29: @BrentM_BuildGuy.14 The account's profile and tweet history are not publicly visible, which makes identity resolution unavailable this issue. The handle suggests a construction or infrastructure background. This remains unresolved.

A secondary tracker, AIFollowGraph (14 followers, not a BigTechAlert-level source), reported two unfollows: @brentm_spacex and @restorebritain_. These are unverified — BigTechAlert, the primary detection source, did not log them. The @brentm_spacex account (speculated to be Brent Mayo, linked to xAI Memphis environmental controversy) is likely distinct from @BrentM_BuildGuy. Without BigTechAlert confirmation, these unfollows are treated as unconfirmed.

Estimated following count: ~1,351 (net +5 from ~1,346 baseline, pending BrentM resolution and unverified unfollow claims)

Three of the five confirmed follows cohere into a specific thesis: Musk is thinking hard about AI compute architecture.

The tinygrad + Cloudflare pairing is not accidental. tinygrad attacks the chip/driver layer (NVIDIA CUDA dependency), while Cloudflare attacks the inference distribution layer (centralized GPU farms). Together they sketch an alternative compute stack that would reduce xAI's $1B/month infrastructure spend and de-risk both the NVIDIA supply chain exposure and the political heat around the Memphis facility. George Hotz's public skepticism about AI agents (he calls LLM-written code "slop") also matches Musk's periodic contrarianism about AI hype — another affinity anchor.

The Lynn Martin follow lands at a different layer: SpaceX IPO preparation. With the price range publishing in less than a week (June 1–5), and the roadshow June 8, Musk following the NYSE president now is textbook pre-IPO relationship management. The SpaceX listing is expected to enter the S&P Communication Services sector — and Martin's exchange is where it happens.

Taken together: the May 28–29 session is the most thematically coherent two-day follow burst since the finance cluster of Issue #12-13. Then it was IPO finance (mlevchin, BretWJ the CFO). Now it's IPO venue + compute infrastructure for what comes after.