New York— Newly appointed Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has stepped out from behind the scenes to take over one of the most high-profile and politically volatile positions in Silicon Valley.
But how little known it is, along with a solid technical background, seem to be what some were looking for to get Twitter out of its current doldrums.
Agrawal, a 37-year-old immigrant from India, does not belong to the ranks of famous CEOs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg; Elon Musk, of SpaceX and Tesla, and even the very man he replaces, Jack Dorsey.
These big-name company founders and leaders have often been in the news — and on Twitter — for exploits that go beyond the usual running of their companies.
The appointment of Agrawal, who was Twitter’s chief technology officer for the past four years, has been seen by Wall Street as a bid for someone who will focus on ushering Twitter into what is seen as the next age of the internet: the metaverse.
Agrawal is a “‘safe’ pick that should be viewed favorably by investors,” wrote Angelo Zino, an analyst at research firm CFRA, who also noted that Elliott Management Corp., a Twitter shareholder, had pushed Dorsey to resign.
Elliott issued a statement today saying Agrawal and new chairman Bret Taylor were the “right leaders for Twitter at this critical time for the company.”
Taylor is president and chief operating officer of business software company Salesforce.
Agrawal joins the ranks of a growing group of Indian-born CEOs of big tech companies, including Google’s parent company Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and IBM’s Arvind Krishna.
The manager joined Twitter in 2011, when it had just 1,000 employees, and has been its technical director since 2017. At the end of last year, the San Francisco-based company had a payroll of 5,500 employees.
Agrawal previously worked at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T in research positions. At Twitter, he has worked on machine learning, revenue and consumption engineering, and helping audience growth. He studied at Stanford and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay.
Although Twitter has high-profile users like politicians and celebrities and is a favorite among journalists, its user base lags far behind old rivals like Facebook and YouTube, and newer ones like TikTok. It has just over 200 million daily active users, a common metric in the industry.
As CEO, Agrawal has to go beyond the technical details and deal with the social and political issues that Twitter and social media in general are struggling with. Among them: misinformation, abuse and effects on mental health.
Agrawal got a quick introduction to life as the CEO of a high-profile company that is one of the central platforms for political discourse online. The Conservatives were quick to unearth a tweet he sent in 2010 that read: “If you’re not going to distinguish between Muslims and extremists, why should I distinguish between whites and racists?”
As some Twitter users pointed out, the 11-year-old tweet quoted a segment from “The Daily Show,” which referenced the firing of Juan Williams, who made a comment about his nervousness about Muslims on a plane.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a message for comment on the tweet.
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