NEW DELHI: After serving 11-months as the chief executive officer (CEO) of social media giant Twitter, Parag Agrawal on Friday was ousted from his position by Elon Musk.
The new boss of Twitter showed the door to not just Agrawal but also few other top executives of Twitter as well.
Agrawal was one of the many Indian-origin CEOs who make up a chunk of S&P 500's market capitalisation.
According to a report by Economic Times, the S&P 500 index includes 500 leading companies that are listed on exchanges in the US and covers approximately 80% if the available mcap.
With Agrawal's ouster, there are now 25 companies that have Indian-origin CEOs. They constitute about 5% of the S&P 500 index and 13% of its total mcap. Interestingly, half of these are IT companies.
Majority of these Indian-origin CEOs were born, raised and graduated in India before moving to the US for post-graduate studies and developed their careers further.
At the top of this list are Microsoft head Satya Nadella and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai. Both of are CEOs of two of the major tech players in the world and have a valuation of over$1,000 billion.
Newly appointed Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan is the latest addition to the list.
Agrawal's stint as CEO
Parag Agrawal, 38, was appointed Twitter CEO in November last year after the social media site's co-founder Jack Dorsey had stepped down.
An IIT Bombay and Stanford alumnus, Agrawal had joined Twitter over a decade ago when there were fewer than 1,000 employees at the company.
He oversaw Twitter's technical strategy and was responsible for improving the pace of software development while advancing the use of machine learning across the company.
Since December 2019, Agrawal was working on Project Bluesky, an independent team of open-source architects, engineers and designers to combat abusive and misleading information on Twitter.
After reports of takeover, both Agrawal and Musk had clashed on few occasions regarding the takeover.
Text messages unveiled during the lawsuit over the deal show that the two had a contentious text exchange early on in the process after Musk asked his followers whether Twitter was “dying.”
Hefty payouts
Parag Agrawal's entry will cost Twitter $66 million, while Vijaya Gadde will get a severance package of $72 million.
The payout is said to be the sum of their current stock holdings, salaries and stock they owned that had not yet vested but which Musk must now shell out.
Even CFO Ned Segal is slated to receive about $17 million, according to Bloomberg.
Like many top leaders at big public companies, Agrawal and others were entitled to severance equal to a year’s salary and cash-outs of unvested equity awards if Twitter was bought and they lost their jobs in the process, according to the terms of the company’s severance policy.
Twitter must also cover their health insurance premiums for a year, amounting to about $31,000 each.
