Newly named Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal has emerged from behind the scenes to handle one of Silicon Valley’s highest-profile and politically unstable jobs.
But his prior lack of name recognition coupled with a solid technical background appears to be what some big company supporters were looking to lift Twitter out of its current quagmire.
A 37-year-old immigrant from India, Agarwal comes from outside the ranks of celebrity CEO, such as the man he is replacing, Jack Dorsey, or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Those brand-name company founders and leaders have often been in the news and on Twitter for exploits beyond the day-to-day operations of their companies.
After serving as Twitter’s chief technology officer for the past four years, Agarwal’s appointment by Wall Street was seen as the choice of someone who would see Twitter as the widely viewed Internet in the next era. I will focus on seeing.
Agarwal is a safe pick that should be viewed favorably by investors, wrote CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino, who noted that Twitter shareholder Elliott Management Corp. had pressured Dorsey to step down.
Elliott issued a statement on Monday, saying Agarwal and new board chairman Brett Taylor were the right leaders for Twitter at this critical moment for the company. Taylor is the president and chief operating officer of business software company Salesforce.
Agarwal, whose name is pronounced (PUH-rag AH-gur-wahl), joins a growing cadre of Indian-American CEOs of big tech companies, including Google parent Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Arvind Krishna of IBM.
He joined San Francisco-based Twitter in 2011, when it had just 1,000 employees, and has been its chief technical officer since 2017. At the end of last year, the company had a workforce of 5,500.
Agarwal previously worked in research roles at Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T. At Twitter, he worked on machine learning, revenue and consumer engineering and helped drive audience growth. He studied at Stanford and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
While Twitter has high-profile users like politicians and celebrities and is a favorite of journalists, its user base lags far behind older rivals like Facebook and YouTube, and newer ones like TikTok. It has just over 200 million daily active users, which is a common industry metric.
As CEO, Agarwal has to step beyond technical details and tackle the social and political issues Twitter and social media are struggling with. These include misinformation, abuse, and effects on mental health.
Agarwal found a rapid introduction to life as the CEO of a high-profile company, one of the central platforms for online political speech. Conservatives quickly traced back to a tweet sent by him in 2010, asking why should I differentiate between white people and racists if they are not going to differentiate between Muslims and extremists.
As some Twitter users pointed out, the 11-year-old’s tweet was quoting a segment of The Daily Show that was referencing the firing of Juan Williams, who made a comment about Muslims being panicked on an airplane. Had it.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the tweet.
Disclaimer: This post has been self-published from the agency feed without modification and has not been reviewed by an editor
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