Non-Resident Indian Parag Agrawal, 37, an IIT-Bombay graduate, has replaced Jack Dorsey as the new Twitter chief executive officer, becoming the youngest CEO among the top 500 US companies.
The Board of Directors unanimously appointed him as the new CEO. Parag Agrawal did his graduation from IIT-Bombay and PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
He joined Twitter in October 2011 as an ads engineer and soon after held the title of the company's 'Distinguished Software Engineer'. He was appointed as its Chief Technology Officer in 2017.
In an email sent to all Twitter employees, Jack Dorsey wrote: "After almost 16 years of having a role at our company from co-founder to CEO to Chair to Exec Chair to Interim CEO to CEO, I decided it is finally time for me to leave."
He then cites three reasons why he is leaving. Dorsey writes, "I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders. My trust in Parag as Twitter's CEO is deep. His work over the past 10 years has been transformational. I'm deeply grateful for his skill, heart, and soul. It's his time to lead."
“We recently updated our strategy to hit ambitious goals, and I believe that strategy to be bold and right,” Agrawal said in an email to employees. “But our critical challenge is how we work to execute against it and deliver results.”
Twitter has revealed that as CEO Parag will be given an annual compensation of USD 1 million as well as stock compensation worth USD 12.5 million.
Within Twitter, Parag is considered one of the top engineers. He was once part of the company’s TAG group, which oversaw all the new products and technologies with Twitter. In 2019, Jack Dorsey announced a new decentralised social media project called Bluesky and brought in Parag to look after it.
Agrawal is expected largely to pick up where Dorsey left off, continuing to fight for users being lured away by competitors like TikTok and Instagram. Over the past year, Twitter has fought to end years-long criticism that it has been slow to introduce new features for its 211 million daily users and was losing ground to social media rivals.
He is already facing his first challenge after sitting in the hot seat. Following the announcement, conservatives quickly unearthed one of Agrawal's tweets in 2010 that read: “If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”
