Elon Musk has completed his acquisition of Twitter, and the Tesla entrepreneur has sacked four top executives at the firm, including CEO Parag Agrawal, as planned. Musk’s decision is unsurprising, given that he has publicly accused Agrawal of deceiving him about the number of spam-bot accounts. Musk famously responded to one of Agrawal’s tweets with a poop emoji.
After Jack Dorsey stepped down in November 2021, India-born Agrawal was chosen as Twitter’s CEO. Dorsey had completely supported Agrawal at the time. Given that Musk sacked him, Agrawal’s tenure at the company was less than a year.
While Musk dismissed Agrawal, their relationship did not have a difficult start, at least publicly. Agrawal hailed Musk when he purchased a controlling share in Twitter in April. Indeed, the message appears top on his profile as a ‘popular tweet.’ “I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve appointed @elonmusk to our board!” “It became evident to us in recent weeks through conversations with Elon that he would offer enormous value to our Board,” the now-fired Twitter CEO had written.
“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to bring big changes to Twitter in the next months!” Musk had also posted. However, Musk refused to join the board and then made a take-it-or-leave-it takeover offer.
Agarwal attempted to disregard the outpouring of criticism by tweeting near the end of April, “I took this job to improve Twitter for the better, course correct when necessary, and strengthen the service.” We are proud of our staff who, despite the hubbub, continue to do their jobs with focus and urgency.”
However, it was evident that Musk did not agree with the way the company was being governed. Musk altered his tune in May, when he began raising concerns about the user account on Twitter, claiming that a high percentage of users were phoney and that the firm had not been forthcoming about its user base.
Agrawal also fired Kayvon Beykpour, the head of Twitter Product, and Bruce Falck, the company’s revenue product lead, in May. He had previously stated that he will continue to make “hard decisions as needed” and “accept the deep complexities of our service and our business.” And more positive change is on the way.”
He also addressed the criticism that he was a “lame-duck” CEO because most people expected Musk to fire him when he took over the company.
It isn’t all terrible news for Agrawal. According to Equilar, which was previously reported by Reuters, he is entitled to $42 million in company pay. Remember that Twitter has never confirmed this figure. The figure includes a year’s pay for Agrawal as well as the expedited vesting of all equity awards. When Musk announced the deal, Agrawal allegedly told employees on Monday that the social media company’s future is questionable. Musk intends to take Tesla private.
