Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk fired former Indian-origin Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal because he was not “a fire-breathing dragon” which the social network wanted in order to thrive, according to a new biography of one of the richest billionaires on Earth.
American author-journalist Walter Isaacson has written the book named ‘Elon Musk’ which is “an intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era — a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence”.
According to excerpts published by the Wall Street Journal, Musk was quite opinionated about Agrawal.
“He is a really nice guy, but managers should not aim to be liked. What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon, and Parag is not that,” he is quoted as saying in Isaacson’s book.
In October last year as he acquired Twitter for $44 billion, Musk informed Agrawal and former legal and public policy head Vijaya Gadde (both appointed by Jack Dorsey) that their employment with the company was terminated.
Both the executives were supposed to receive a hefty exit package.
Agrawal was last active on Twitter on October 6, 2022 (with 601.9K followers), and has not been seen active on any other social media platform, including Meta’s Threads.
In December last year, Musk released the “Twitter Files” season 2, revealing that the micro-blogging platform had a secret group that included Gadde, then CTO Agrawal and Yoel Roth, former global head of trust and safety, that made controversial decisions including “shadow banning” high-profile users without informing then CEO Dorsey.
Angel investor Alex Cohen tweeted in July this year: “I still can’t believe Parag Agrawal only had to be CEO of Twitter from 11 months to then get paid $60 million in severance and now gets to sit back and enjoy this incredible drama”.
“Pretty sure he didn’t get paid,” replied Eric Bahn who calls himself a ‘Minivan Enthusiast’ at Hustle Fund.