No, ESR has never been involved with Emacs development. He has a history of invading prominent free software projects on the strength of his "hacker" cred, piss

No, ESR has never been involved with Emacs development. He has a history of invading prominent free software projects on the strength of his "hacker" cred, pissing all over them with his pet peeve of the day, insisting on making easy and unnecessary changes of shoddy quality, often at the expense of more important actual development that is underway, and then bragging about being Prominent FreeSoftware Developer to boost his dying hacker cred. The only stand-alone software project ESR has truly driven himself is fetchmail. Fetchmail. Enough said.