Kairan Quazi became the youngest engineer ever hired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and in a twist of events, the 14-year-old prodigy who graduated college eight years early is old enough to work at SpaceX, but not apparently old enough to have a LinkedIn profile. Unsurprisingly, he’s furious about it and has slammed LinkedIn for being “primitive” for deeming him too young for the platform.
“We’re excited by your enthusiasm, energy, and focus. We can’t wait to see what you do in the world,” reads the message sent to Kairan Quazi, the youthful SpaceX Starlink hire who posted a screenshot of it in outrage on his Instagram and Twitter accounts. “Because you currently do not meet the age eligibility criteria to join, we have restricted your account.”
The message added that Quazi would be able to rejoin the platform once he turned 16, and that until then, he’d receive a refund for the platform’s pricey premium plan.
As one might imagine, the Kairan is not having it as he wrote in his post’s caption:
“This is the illogical, primitive nonsense that I face constantly. I can be qualified enough to land one of the most coveted engineering jobs in the world but not qualified enough to have access to a professional social media platform?”
He added that LinkedIn, by deleting his account, is “showing everyone how regressive some tech company policies are.”
Ironically enough, the world was alerted to Quazi’s incredible achievement because, as Insider reported, he posted about it on his LinkedIn before it got kiboshed. Before that, he gained notoriety for being seriously precocious, starting college at the age of nine and becoming an artificial intelligence research fellow at Intel when he was just 11.
“I think there’s a conventional mindset that I’m missing out on childhood, but I don’t think that’s true,” Quazi told the Bay Area’s ABC7 News. “I think, again, that mindset would have me graduating middle school now.”
That same bravado is on full display in his outraged posts about his LinkedIn accounts, and frankly, we can’t say we blame the kid given all that he’s achieved in his short life.
