India’s IITians have become invaluable assets for the global tech industry and often end up leading some of the world’s largest tech firms. One such individual is Parag Agrawal, an IIT Bombay alumnus, who rose to become the CEO of Twitter (now X) within less than a decade of joining the social media giant. However, his tenure at the top was short-lived as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, acquired Twitter for a staggering $44 billion deal, and sacked most of the company’s top executives, including its then CEO Parag Agrawal.
Born in a well-educated family in Ajmer, Rajasthan, Parag Agrawal excelled in studies from a young age as the family gave precedence to academics, with his father working as a senior official at the Indian Department of Atomic Energy, and his mother an economic professor.
After completing his schooling, Parag Agrawal cracked the IIT-JEE, one of the toughest entrance examinations in the country, with an impressive All India Rank (AIR) of 77, and earned his admission into the prestigious IIT Bombay, where he graduated with a BTech degree in Computer Science in 2005.
Following his graduation, Parag Agrawal started his professional career as an intern at Microsoft Research and Yahoo, and also pursued a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
In 2011, Parag Agrawal joined Twitter, and quickly rose through the ranks to become the company’s Chief Technology Officer in 2017. Five years later, Agrawal took over as the CEO of Twitter on November 29, 2021, after the company’s co-founder Jack Dorsey decided to step down.
Parag received an annual salary package of over Rs 100 crore, which included restricted stock units valued at around Rs 94 crore. But his tenure as CEO would be short-lived as he, along with several other top executives, were fired by Elon Musk, when he acquired the Twitter in late 2022.
In November last year, Agrawal scored a major legal victory over Musk when a US District Court in California, allowed him and other former Twitter executives to sue the Tesla CEO. According to a report by Bloomberg, a California district court judge, ruled that the dismissed Twitter executives can sue Musk for cheating them of their severance pay when he fired them during his 2022 acquisition of the micro-blogging platform, without giving them a chance to resign.
A lawsuit was filed against Elon Musk by former Twitter execs, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, ex-CFO Ned Segal, ex-legal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and Twitter’s former general counsel Sean Edgett.
Following his sudden exit from Twitter, Parag Agrawal is now working to build his own AI startup, that aims to develop software for Large Language Models (LLMs). Agrawal has reportedly secured the required funding for his startup from major investors like Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures and First Round Capital.
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