The story of an Indian-American hiring a woman to slap him every time he opened Facebook has caught the internet’s attention again, thanks to just two emojis from billionaire Elon Musk.
Maneesh Sethi, founder of wearable devices brand Pavlok, hired a woman to slap him in the face every time he used Facebook. He hired the woman through US classified advertisements website Craigslist. He offered $8 an hour for the job that required the person to work sitting next to him at a café or his home and watch his screen.
“When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me,” he had written in the ad in 2012. Sethi found the results of his whacky experiment “astounding” after hiring the slapper, Kara.
“My average productivity runs around 35-40% on most days. When Kara sat next to me, my productivity skyrocketed to 98%,” he wrote in a blog.
Sethi’s experiment was widely reported in 2012 and now, nine years later, he earned an emoji from Elon Musk, whose words on Twitter have the power to push cryptocurrency rates from record highs and get the internet talking.
The Tesla and SpaceX founder simply replied to a tweet about Sethi’s story with two blaze emojis, thus arousing his followers’ curiosity about the slapping experiment.
🔥🔥
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 10, 2021
“I’m the guy in this picture. Is @elonmusk giving me two emojis the highest I’ll ever reach? Is this my icarus flying too close to the sun moment? Was that implied by the fire symbols elon posted? Time will tell,” Sethi wrote on Twitter, replying to Musk.
He said he founded his wearable devices company based on this experiment and that the Pavlok wearable device delivers an electric zap and positive sensations to reward good habits and break bad ones.
Watch Maneesh Sethi’s slapping experiment here:
An elated Sethi also tweeted this: “First nomad list, then Elon emojiing my slapping story, today’s just my day isn’t it.” Banter followed soon as other social media users commented on his slapping experiment.
“I think being slapped is your thing,” Will Kretz told him, to which Sethi said, “That’s what my mom thinks too.” Another person asked him if it was a “suppressed sexual fetish”.
That's what my mom thinks too
— Maneesh Sethi (@maneesh) November 10, 2021
“Not my fetish, no matter how hard i try,” Sethi said.
Not my fetish, no matter how hard i try.
— Maneesh Sethi (@maneesh) November 10, 2021
When a user asked if he has hired a slapper to control his Twitter usage too, he pointed to Pavlok, the wearable device he invented.
