Parag Agrawal was appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer of Twitter after the founder Jack Dorsey announced on his verified handle yesterday that he is stepping down as the CEO.
Dorsey named Parag Agrawal as the new CEO with immediate effect, stating that Agrawal has been his choice despite the board choosing him, and he profoundly understands the company and its needs.
He noted that Agrawal has been “behind every critical decision that helped turn this company around; he is curious, probing, rational, creative, demanding, self-aware and humble. He leads with heart and soul and is someone I learn from daily. My trust in him as our CEO is bone-deep,” he said.
Who is Parag Agrawal?
Parag Agrawal is a 37-year-old Indian-American technology executive born in Mumbai, India, to a father who was a senior official in the Indian Department of Atomic Energy and a Mother who is a retired school teacher.
He got his undergraduate B.Tech degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 2005.
He moved to the United States to pursue his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University California between 2005 and 2012.
He joined Microsoft for a four-month research role before joining Yahoo and AT&T for a permanent research position.
He moved on to join Twitter in 2011 as a Software Engineer, after Dorsey returned as the CEO, and was the first recipient to have received the title ‘Distinguished Engineer’ after working on increasing relevance of Users’ tweets on their timeline and audience growth.
Agrawal was then promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2018 and placed in charge of Project Bluesky in 2019.
Bluesky is an initiative set up to develop a decentralized social network protocol; multiple social networks will have their systems of curation and moderation and can interact with other social networks through an open standard.
He was announced as the new CEO of Twitter on November 29, 2021, after the owner and founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, announced his resignation.
Since his announcement, Agrawal has come under criticism for a tweet he made in 2010 that says, “If they are not going to make a distinction between Muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”
He has since claimed to be quoting a British-American Actor and Comedian, Aasif Mandvi, during a story on the daily mail.
The New Twitter CEO is married to Vineeta Agrawal, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm; she is also a physician and clinical professor at Stanford Medicine.
They are blessed with a young son who also has a Twitter account.
