Elon Musk's Israeli Hacker in a Special Interview: "When I Landed, a Contract from Elon Was Already Waiting"
Yoni Ramon, a former key security expert at Tesla, discusses his unexpected recruitment by Elon Musk, his work in the Twitter "war room," and the launch of his new startup, Pi Security, which continues to develop technology in Israel.
When Yoni Ramon flew for a family visit to the United States in 2012, he didn't really plan to find a new job. But the moment he landed back in Israel, a signed employment contract from the US was already waiting for him. The offer was signed by none other than Elon Musk. He didn't know that this job offer would lead him to one of the most important roles at Tesla, to the status of "Musk's favorite hacker" as he was later called, and to a central figure in the inner circle of one of the most influential people in the technology world. Now he is embarking on an independent path with Pi Security, a new startup he founded, which brings to its clients the experience and insights he and his partner have accumulated over the years. In a special interview with Geektime, he talks about the unexpected recruitment to Tesla, the days when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, the war room established during the takeover of Twitter, the close relationship with Musk, and the new startup he founded, which insists on operating in Israel as well.
8 hours before the flight back to Israel – the phone call arrived
In 2012, Ramon was still working at a subsidiary of the Israeli IT company Matrix. During a trip to the United States, he went to buy a MacBook at the Apple Store in Philadelphia, when suddenly, next to the Apple store, he saw for the first time in his life a Tesla showroom. "That was the first time I was exposed to the Tesla brand," says Ramon, who by pure coincidence was working at that time with Better Place, Shai Agassi's electric vehicle venture. He entered the showroom, and then into one of the demo cars that were there, and as a geek, what goes through your mind every time you are inside a smart electric vehicle crossed his mind. "I told a friend who was with me that it's a computer on wheels and how I would die to try to hack this car."
Ramon might have been joking, but a week later, when he was on the last day of his trip in San Francisco, he received a mysterious phone call from a source at Tesla, who asked him to come urgently for a job interview. Ramon says he said on the phone, "Lior, stop joking around," but then realized he was talking to a real source at the company. He explained to them that he had a flight in 8 hours, "If you want, I can arrive right this moment." Somehow, this deadline fit, and he arrived at the legendary Tesla factory in Fremont.
Tesla of that time, let's recall, is not like the automotive giant of today. These were the early days of the company, when it had just started mass production of a first model (Model S) and sold a few thousand cars a year. Ramon was asked to be the second employee in the information security team that the company was forming. "The truth? I didn't know what Tesla was before. I was at the factory, they gave me a tour, and I told them 'Thank you very much, I need to go to the flight. If you are serious, let's continue talking'," says Ramon.
When he got off the plane and reconnected to the network, a contract was already waiting for him in his email. The signatory was Elon Musk, in person. Ramon claims he wasn't sure he wanted to sign, even though he had thought quite a bit about relocating to the United States. So he decided to consult with his father and showed him the contract. His father's answer was sharp: "Sign quickly and send it back," he recalls. "He knew Tesla and he thought it was a wonderful opportunity. Two weeks later I was already on a plane back to California with the suitcases." Thus, at the age of 29, with only 5 minutes of experience in the company's vehicle, and without knowing how Musk reached him, Ramon set out on the new path.
"My team had the most influence on Tesla's security"
At this stage, Ramon, almost alone, had to build a new team. "We had to understand how to protect Tesla from all the threats around, and there were many threats," he says. If the security threats weren't enough, Tesla also had to deal with complex market and operational challenges – from cracking the design, technology, and product, to educating the market to abandon the familiar vehicles of manufacturers that have been active for about 100 years in favor of a young startup from California.
"We were a few days away from bankruptcy and I was with Elon in a meeting in those days. He told me that if he doesn't raise money by tomorrow, there is no money to pay the employees," he recalls. According to him, it was a very unpleasant conversation, but he believed that if there is someone who can pull a rabbit out of a hat, it is Elon Musk. And indeed, the rabbit was pulled out, the employees received the payment, and Tesla was saved, until the next crisis.
This challenging path also led more than once to rounds of layoffs, although Ramon says that his team was highly appreciated. "Elon and I always had a very good relationship. He really appreciated me and my team. I personally was never afraid of being fired, so I told Elon the truth to his face. Apparently, he appreciated that. I can tell you with all modesty that my team had the most influence on Tesla's security over the years. The organization really understood the value we bring and I don't think they wanted to sabotage it."
Ramon's memories remind a bit of the turmoil experienced by employees at another company of Musk, SpaceX, which today dominates the field of space launches, but at the beginning of its path was one test launch away from collapse and bankruptcy. "It's a roller coaster, but our destination is very clear. From my first days at Tesla, we understood that what we are doing now? We will still talk about these days, because it's clear that this is going to explode. It's a question of when, not if. We are building something that is significant. So it's okay, the situation is difficult, but we are building things so cool that the public doesn't even understand yet. Wait until they understand where we are going," says Ramon.
Playing Diablo together
Over the years, Ramon became a prominent figure in the company reporting directly to the Tesla board. Musk, who is also known as a person who is not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get into the technical depth of various issues, knew that if his "computer on wheels" were hacked, the implications could be devastating for the company. "Elon is a very technical person... it really interested him. Many times we presented very specific things to Elon so he could make decisions and pass it on to the rest of the teams. Very quickly he got to know me and my team." The close work slowly turned into a friendly relationship beyond working hours, which continues even today.
"I always thought he was fun and funny. He is a very funny person, and he is technical and I appreciate that. And he is also a nerd, which I also appreciate," says Ramon. "He and I play the same games. So I always teased him that he is less good than me at Diablo. He would ask me how many hours of play I have, and I took a screenshot of the play hours for him... Always when a new campaign started I would ask him what Class he starts playing to check with him what is most worth it. He is really a good player." This friendly relationship also includes sending funny memes, "Once I sent him a funny meme and within 3 minutes it was already on his X feed," he recalls.
According to Ramon, Musk in reality is exactly the same Musk we know from the media and his X account, "He is exactly the character we know from his public appearances," says Ramon and describes a person who knows how to yell at people when it's necessary to yell at them ("When you hear that he is not nice, you are either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you are not familiar with the details. He expects everyone to be familiar with the small details like him, and that can annoy him"), but claims that he is an "excellent person" and adds that "he never yelled at me, and I told him very unpleasant things to his face. On the contrary, he always preferred real opinions that reflect reality... After you are surrounded by many yes-men, you enjoy hearing the truth," concludes Ramon.
Let that sink in
We first encountered Ramon's name when we read the excellent biography of Elon Musk written by Walter Isaacson. One of the fascinating stories in which he is mentioned was during Musk's takeover of Twitter. Ramon was urgently called from the Tesla offices straight to the Twitter offices in the heart of San Francisco, to be responsible for the security of Twitter's systems during the transition and to protect them from angry employees, who opposed the acquisition and could have sabotaged the platform. "When I got this call (from Musk), I knew it was going to be interesting," recalls Ramon, "I knew it was going to be difficult. But there are things you know will be on the pages of history. This is going to be big." According to Ramon, this is a completely accepted process in any company ("You don't trust employees blindly. That's why you have antivirus and DLP. In the end, something can come from the employee's side and you want to protect against it"), but when he realized that Musk planned to fire about 80% of the entire company, he knew there could be many people who would be happy to sabotage the process. "It's not for nothing that when big players like Microsoft and Google and the rest do big layoffs, they do it in an orderly manner and immediately disconnect the employee's access to the systems. Sometimes even before the announcement. You can't take the risk that one of the employees will want to do something bad," he explains.
Ramon describes two weeks of war in which he had to map as quickly as possible the various systems of Twitter, and prioritize them and the key players in the company. The goal, according to him, was first of all to protect the systems, and to understand along the way who should remain in the company. To add to the complexity, the team that Ramon led worked against the clock, because the company was still public, and within a few days the stock was expected to be delisted from trading. "The moment that happens, a sequence of things begins that you need to be prepared for." Among other things, Ramon found quite threatening messages from employees on Twitter's Slack. Anyone who remembers the days of Twitter during the Jack Dorsey era, remembers the power that the employees had, who did not hesitate to take open and hidden criticisms of the management and the conduct of the company. Now imagine what it looked like when a character like Musk arrives who wants to take over the company.
In Isaacson's book, it is described how Ramon interrogated Yoel Roth, one of the senior figures at Twitter, who headed the content filtering field, and later earned Musk's appreciation. According to Ramon, Isaacson was a fly on the wall in the most important rooms during the Twitter takeover period, and even when the writer didn't sit there, Ramon claims that "his ear was somehow in the right places," and he managed to quote conversations in which he definitely wasn't present. "I knew they were writing a book about him, but I didn't think for a moment that I would be a chapter in the book," he laughs.
But after these two stormy and intense weeks, Ramon asked to return to his regular job at Tesla: "I don't like to see people fired. I don't like to see a company I knew long before, which has thousands of employees, shrinking to hundreds. It's not for nothing that you didn't read about me before. I run away from the press," he says. And indeed, at that time he appeared on the radar of many journalists, who tried to contact and get from him more information about Musk and the acquisition process; he, of course, emphasizes, with commendable Israeli honesty, that although he enjoyed the conversation with me, if not for Pi, his new startup, he would have preferred not to talk to the media, "I love and prefer my privacy. I'm not looking for fame, and I even more don't like when the press looks for me."
Bringing the brain of Tesla and Microsoft security guards to your organization
About two years ago, Ramon came to the conclusion that he wanted to do something different and new, and knew he wanted to start a startup. "I knew that if I stayed at Tesla, it just wouldn't happen. It's a kind of vortex. You always get sucked into the next thing, the next product. I had to break this cycle and I left." Musk, by the way, supported the move. According to Ramon, he simply sent Musk a message that he was resigning, and explained to him that he was not planning to go to competitors, but to do something "other cool," and in response the richest man in the world simply wished him luck. "Elon doesn't try to keep anyone by force. Everyone has replacements, even me, and I think he appreciated that I came and told him that," says Ramon, "11 years in the company is a lot and I think he was happy. I also always know that I can tell him in a message 'Elon, I want to return, and the door is open'."
And indeed, last June, Ramon revealed with his partner, Guy Arzi, Pi Security, their new startup. Pi, which was first revealed last June, received investments of 35 million dollars from funds like Brightmind Partners and Third Point Ventures, as well as from the CEO of CrowdStrike and the founders of the company Armis.
In short, the company is developing a kind of "autonomous security person," which is based on the analysis of design documents, code, cloud infrastructure, and developer documentation to understand the broad context of each action. Based on all this data, the system filters out false alerts, identifies real vulnerabilities, and fixes them automatically, and unlike other tools, Pi does not treat vulnerabilities as point events: it gets to the root of the problem, fixes all code variations, and can shorten the handling time of findings from several days to less than half an hour.
"We are Agentic SDLC," explains Ramon, "Our idea is to create a layer of Data, or what we call Institutional Memory, which is supposed to serve essentially all Product Security processes of all kinds. We give the right data to the right processes at the right time." That is, Pi looks broadly at the way companies and organizations build tools, fix code, what were the vulnerabilities in the past, how they deal with vulnerabilities, how they implement frameworks and more – and then applies everything as you would have done. "Our idea is to be an Enabler for Application Security that were always in the minority. We enable secure development in the contemporary world without slowing down development processes with a lot of tools and layers." Ramon explains that the product the company built is a kind of Product Security Engineer, which is based on the same information sources that an employee has, learns the same things he learns, and simply applies these methods at the right time, and unlike employees, who can leave the company and take the knowledge with them – Pi learns everything and is available to everyone.
One of the most effective sources of information, according to Ramon, is the Bug Bounty Program, "It's a gold mine for us," he says. Why? There he sees all the vulnerabilities, the way of dealing with them, the duration of time, and the way of fixing. At the same time, Pi can also connect to Jira and see the entire history of tickets from any source in the company.
How is this different from competing products? Ramon explains that other companies can offer a similar solution but the implementation will be different. "I think that's where one of the relative advantages of Guy and me comes in. Doing this at Microsoft and Tesla for many years gives us a very different angle than someone who just for example, only comes out of 8200. There is something in the very high scale of organizations like Tesla and Microsoft that simply doesn't exist in other places." According to him, Pi does not protect a single process or two, but the entire development process from the Design process to Deployment. "It's not One shirt size fits all," every organization is a whole world and builds code differently. It is very important to understand these small nuances and that we do very well.
"I learned from the most successful entrepreneur in the world," says Ramon. "To this day, Tesla is a kind of startup." According to him, many times people outside the company asked how they too can enjoy the things that Ramon and his team built. "I told myself that this is the opportunity to build something that they too will have something from this thing. Most places can't bring Yoni or Guy. We wanted to build technology that they will have us, maybe not physically, but a lot of what we would do in the day-to-day, they get with Pi. So yes, there are many companies that do this, but they don't do it like us."
When I ask Ramon what things he learned from working with Musk and Tesla that he brings to Pi, he claims that it is the understanding that if you use the organizational memory properly, you can go very far. Thus, findings from Tesla's Bug Bounty program were leveraged for internal processes, and now Pi can with the help of AI take those same findings in another company and leverage them.
Ramon operates from San Francisco, and his partner, Guy Arzi, is also expected to move to the area in the coming weeks. But despite this, the two decided to establish a development center specifically in Israel, in addition to the development center in the United States, even though it requires Ramon to sometimes get on a daily at 12 at night his time. "We really love the human capital in Israel. There is a lot of advantage in working with Israel. We are very hardworking, very smart, and very goal-oriented," says Ramon, and notes that the waves of layoffs in the Israeli high-tech leave many excellent people available for work. "When I interview someone here (in San Francisco), he sometimes interviews also for Anthropic and OpenAI. So sometimes I find brilliant people but they already have a job offer. In Israel, you can find very good people in what they do. It doesn't mean they are not expensive, but it is easier to recruit now in Israel. I learned from Elon a sentence he always used to tell us: 'If you are interviewing Nikola Tesla. What does it matter where he is? Take him to work. Don't miss him'." And yes, Pi continues to recruit employees in Israel for a number of positions. "We are looking for people who are Passionate and who are champions in their field. We do research, development, and product. I think there is a very good reason for people to join us, if you want to leave a mark and that everyone will use what you build."
Musk's secret
And although Ramon is considered one of the people Musk trusted more than anyone, entrusted him with significant parts of the Twitter acquisition project, and to this day talks to him regularly and plays computer games with him – there is one thing Musk is not willing to tell Ramon: how he reached him then 14 years ago. "He never agreed to tell me. I had lunch with him a week ago and we were just talking about it. He is not willing to say. He only says that he has his sources." There are things that never change.
