Barbara Ortute
Associated Press
New Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal
The newly appointed Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, has stepped out from behind the scenes to take over one of Silicon Valley’s most high-profile and politically turbulent jobs.
But his lack of visibility before, coupled with a solid technical background, seems to be the reason why some large company supporters want to lead Twitter out of the current predicament.
Agrawal, a 37-year-old immigrant from India, comes from the ranks of celebrity CEOs, including the person he is succeeding, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla. The founders and leaders of those famous brand companies often appear in the news and Twitter because of loopholes outside of their company’s daily operations.
Having served as the chief technology officer of Twitter for the past four years, the appointment of Agrawal is seen by Wall Street as a candidate who will focus on bringing Twitter into the next era widely regarded as the Internet, the meta universe.
Agrawal is a’safe’ option and should be favored by investors,” wrote CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino, noting that Twitter shareholder Elliott Management Corp. has put pressure on Dorsey to step down.
Elliott issued a statement on November 29 stating that Agrawal and the new chairman of the board of directors Bret Taylor are “Twitter the right leader at this critical moment.” Taylor is the President and Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce, a business software company.
Agrawal’s name is pronounced (PUH-rag AH-gur-wahl), and he has joined a growing number of Indian-American CEOs of major American technology companies, including Google’s parent company Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and IBM’s Arvind Krishna.
He joined San Francisco-based Twitter in 2011, when Twitter had only 1,000 employees, and has served as its chief technology officer since 2017. At the end of last year, the company had 5,500 employees.
Agrawal previously held research positions at Microsoft, Yahoo, and AT&T. At Twitter, he worked in machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering, and helping audiences grow. He studied at Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai.
Although Twitter has well-known users such as politicians and celebrities, and is a favorite of journalists, its user base lags far behind old rivals such as Facebook and YouTube and new competitors such as TikTok. It has more than 200 million active users every day, which is a common industry indicator.
As CEO, Agrawal must go beyond technical details to deal with the social and political issues that Twitter and social media are trying to solve. These include misinformation, abuse, and impact on mental health.
As the CEO of a well-known company, Agrawal soon began his life, the company is one of the core platforms for online political speech. Conservatives quickly discovered a tweet he sent in 2010 that read “If they don’t intend to distinguish between Muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between whites and racists.”
As some Twitter users have pointed out, this 11-year-old tweet quoted an excerpt from the “Daily Show” referring to the dismissal of Juan Williams, who published a comment on the flight Muslims feel nervous about the comments.
Twitter did not immediately respond to comments on the tweet.
