After Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase deal of Twitter late on Thursday, its top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal, legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and General Counsel Sean Edgett were fired and escorted out of the company's San Francisco headquarters, according to several media reports. The Tesla CEO had accused the top leadership at Twitter of misleading him and investors over the number of fake accounts on the social media platform.
Reportedly, the former Indian-origin CEO Parag Agarwal is set to receive the largest payout of $38.7 million, largely due "to the entirety of his shares vesting upon his firing". For the unversed, Indian-origin technology executive Parag Agrawal was appointed as the CEO of Twitter after the social media giant’s co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down in November 2011. Parag Agrawal had joined the microblogging site in 2011 as an Ads Engineer and has served as CTO since 2017.
Who is Parag Agrawal
Parag Agrawal, 38, was appointed Twitter CEO in November last year after the social media site’s co-founder Jack Dorsey had stepped down. An IIT Bombay and Stanford alumnus, Agrawal joined Twitter over a decade ago when there were fewer than 1,000 employees at the company.
He did his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 2011. His appointment as the chief technology officer (CTO) was announced internally in October 2017, where he was in charge of the firm's technical strategy. Agrawal joined Twitter in October 2011 as an ads engineer. Before joining Twitter, he did research internships at AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo. His contributions at Twitter include leading efforts to increase the relevance of tweets in Twitter users' timelines using Artificial Intelligence (AI). ALSO READ: Parag Agrawal fired; here's how much former Twitter CEO will receive in 'largest payout'
During the lawsuit, Musk and Agarwal had a contentious exchange during the deal process. The duo had a clash recently. Musk's arrival made it obvious that Agrawal would not likely be retained in his position. Earlier, Musk stated, "I don't have confidence in management," and the two executives traded public jabs. In May, Musk replied with a poop emoji to a thread on Twitter started by Agrawal defending the company's user metrics.
Musk complained publicly that he believed Twitter's spam accounts were significantly higher than the company's estimate. To which the company said the spam accounts on the platform were less than 5% of its monetisable daily active users.
ALSO READ: Elon Musk buys Twitter & fires Parag Agrawal; netizens share Trump jokes, funny memes for new owner
