Elon Musk took over as the new owner of Twitter Inc. on October 27, ousting top employees he accused of misleading him. Musk fired Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of policy and legal Vijaya Gadde, according to the New York Times.

He had said that they had misled both him and the investors of Twitter about the prevalence of spam accounts on the social media platform.

Who is Parag Agrawal?

Parag Agrawal was born on May 21, 1984, in Mumbai, India. He was named the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) on November 29, 2021. His appointment came rolling in after the co-creator of Twitter Jack Dorsey stepped down from the same post. Parag was appointed as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2018. He joined the microblogging site in 2011 as an Ads Engineer. While doing so, he succeeded Adam Messinger, who left the company in December 2016.

His mother is a retired teacher, while his father worked in the atomic energy sector. Agrawal studied at Mumbai’s Atomic Energy Central School. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B). Following that he completed his PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 2011.

Apart from being an Ads Engineer, he has also held the post of Distinguished Software Engineer. Before Twitter, he did stints at AT&T, Microsoft and Yahoo.

At Twitter, he helped the team increase the relevance of tweets in Twitter users’ timelines using Artificial Intelligence (AI), which in turn helps Twitter in preventing abuse on the social network.

He is responsible for Twitter’s Technical Strategy, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Consumer, Revenue and Science teams.

According to Parag’s biography on the Twitter leadership page, he is responsible for “Twitter’s technical strategy and overseeing machine learning and AI across the consumer, revenue, and science teams”.

In December 2019, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Agrawal would be in charge of Project Bluesky, “an independent team of open source architects, engineers and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media that would help better control abusive and misleading information on its platform”.