Elon Musk hands sheep meme man the keys to Tesla’s Twitter: British museum worker behind ‘absolute unit’ tweet goes from £24k to £75,000-a-year job after being hired as car maker’s social media guru
- Adam Koszary currently tweets for Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life
- But he found international acclaim for a viral meme about ‘absolute unit’ sheep
- The smash hit tweet attracted the attention of Tesla billionaire Elon Musk
- Now Musk’s firm Tesla has brought Mr Koszary in to work on its social media
One minute he was handling the Twitter account at a small Berkshire museum which welcomes around 100 visitors a day and is closed on Mondays.
The next minute, with the help of long-dead Exmoor sheep, Adam Koszary was accepting a job as the social media manager of globe-straddling firm Tesla.
The extraordinary career move is thought to be down to just one tweet, showing the ram with the caption ‘Look at this absolute unit’, which he posted on the feed of Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life.
The tweet, which showed a photo taken on a Devon farm from the 1960s, went around the world last year, amassing more than 110,000 likes and attracting the attention of Tesla boss Elon Musk.
Adam Koszary, currently the media manager for a small farming museum, has been recruited by Tesla after a tweet he posted went viral and attracted the attention of Elon Musk
He owes his success to this tweet of a photo of a sheep which was on show in the museum
This week, Koszary told of his joy at joining electric car giant Tesla as social media manager
Musk, the billionaire behind the electric car giant, changed his profile picture to the image of the sheep earlier this year and has now offered Mr Koszary a job.
Mr Koszary, who was due to start a social media role at art gallery, The Royal Academy, announced this week he was in fact starting work for Tesla.
He tweeted: ‘So I have more news. I’m no longer moving to the Royal Academy. Instead, I’ll be Tesla’s Social Media Manager from July.’
It’s unclear how much of a pay rise he’ll get, but the museum job was advertised as having a starting salary of £24,000-a-year, while Tesla were offering £75,000-a-year for a social media manager.
Silicon Valley-based Tesla currently has 3.76million Twitter followers, compared with the Reading museum’s 133,000.
The Museum of English Rural Life said in it’s annual report that they tweet ‘has helped ensure that the museum is reaching a global audience, with The MERL social media accounts attracting over 34,000 new followers by the end of July. Our content has reached 40 million people around the world’.
Elon Musk so loved the photo he used it as his profile picture. He has now employed the man who came up with it for an estimated £75,000 a year
Mr Koszary will leave the relative peace and quiet of Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life
When asked why he thought the ‘absolute unit’ ram tweet last year was such a success, previously told MailOnline: ‘Because it really is an impressive ram, and people don’t expect museums to be using memes like we do (and especially with a name likes ours).
‘People just wanted to come together to celebrate an impressive ram.’
He added: ‘Elon likes memes and someone dared him to change his profile picture to the sheep.
‘We figured if he was going to masquerade as our ram we were going to masquerade as him. Just silly really.’
Mr Koszary studied ancient history at the University of Manchester before getting a masters in Museum Studies at University College London. He has since worked at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Tesla, which is based in Silicon Valley, California, will be a whole new challenge for him