Twitter Owner Elon Musk fires CEO Parag Agrawal, seeks Sriram Krishnan’s advice
Sriram Krishnan, adviser to Elon Musk on Twitter
November 6, 2022
“the bird is freed,” tweeted Elon Musk last Thursday, a minute before midnight, upon completing his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.
Earlier that day, Twitter’s Chief executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, both Indian Americans, were among the senior executives fired by Musk and “hastily escorted out of the company’s San Francisco headquarters,” The Washington Post reported. About half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees are expected to lose their jobs, on the advice of a team Musk assembled to reshape the social media platform.
“Now that the word is out: I’m helping out (Elon Musk) with Twitter temporarily with some other great people,” Sriram Krishnan, tweeted. He is one of Musk’s advisers, apparently the only one who earlier worked at Twitter.
Others on the team include Jared Birchall, who manages Musk’s personal fortune, and David Sacks, an investor who worked with Musk at PayPal in the early 2000’s and is a “conservative media figure and a major Republican donor,” according to The Washington Post. “I (and a16z) believe (Twitter) is a hugely important company and can have great impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen,” Krishnan, 39-years-old, added.
Twitter is the 15th most popular social media site in the world, after Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Pinterest. Twitter is popular among the 25 to 34 age group. It has about 400 million users worldwide, of which about 230 million are active daily. In the U.S., about 10% of users account for 92% of the tweets.
Krishnan is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm also known as a16z. The firm, based in Palo Alto and which manages $35 billion in assets, has reportedly invested $400 million to join in Musk ’s purchase of Twitter.
In February 2021, Musk appeared on Good Times Show, a podcast on Clubhouse, hosted by Krishnan and his wife Aarthi Ramamurthy. Though the chat began at 1 am, Musk’s appearance attracted several thousand, giving the platform a major marketing boost. Krishnan’s podcast, which has 194,000 followers, covers “tech, creators and how people can make it to the ‘inside’".
Clubhouse offers online private chat rooms as well as public conference and broadcast platforms. It was co-founded by Indian American Rohan Seth and is also funded by a16z.
Musk, 51, is the world’s richest person with an estimated net worth of about $210 billion, according to Forbes. He is the founder of electric vehicle maker Tesla, with a market value of $655 billion, space flight venture SpaceX and other businesses. Musk is using debt, with his Tesla stock as collateral, to fund much of his cost to buy Twitter. With more than $90 billion of shares pledged for loans, he is the most leveraged U.S. CEO, according to CNBC. In 2021, Twitter had a net loss of $221 million on $5.1 billion in revenues.
On his LinkedIn profile, Krishnan describes himself as “a builder, engineer, Youtuber and venture capitalist. I invest in crypto/web3 as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz,” which he joined in 2021.
While at Twitter, from 2017 to 2019, Krishnan led core product teams including home timeline, onboarding/new user experience, search, and discovery. Earlier he was at Snap and, from 2013 to 2016, at Facebook. Following his graduation, from 2005 to 2011, he worked at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, on the Windows Azure team. He also wrote a book Programming Windows Azure.
In 2005, he earned a B.Tech. in Information Technology from SRM Engineering College, affiliated with Anna University, in Chennai, India. SRM is a private college where the current total annual costs for a B.Tech. degree is about $10,000 for students from India.
Parag Agrawal, former CEO Twitter
Fired Twitter Executives
Following his being fired by Musk, Parag Agrawal, 37, could receive $39 million in compensation, triggered by a change of control provision in the contract he signed when he took over as CEO In November 2021. Vijaya Gadde, 47, Twitter’s Chief Legal Officer, was also expected to be paid $13 million due to a similar provisions in her contract.
In April, in a regulatory filing related to his offer to buy Twitter, Musk stated, “I don’t have confidence in [Twitter’s current] management.” Last week, following his purchase, Musk reportedly won’t pay Agrawal, Gadde and some other senior executives their severance and stock option payments on grounds that they were fired “for cause.”
From 2017, Agrawal served as Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer, leading teams, including in machine learning, to improve consumer experience and accelerate audience and revenue growth. He joined the company in 2011 as a software engineer, while working on a Ph.D. Earlier, he spent over a year in research at Yahoo and served in internships at AT&T Labs and Microsoft.
He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, 2005-2012, and a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He finished high school from the Atomic Energy Central School in India.
Earlier, Gadde served as the General Counsel, Head of Communications and in other roles at Twitter. She worked at Juniper Networks and, from 2000 to 2010, was at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Gadde holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.
Apparently, even if they do not get their severance payments, Agrawal and Gadde will be fine financially. In 2021, Agrawal earned $30 million in salary, stock, and other compensation while Gadde earned a total compensation of $17 million. She earned $7 million in 2020 and $8 million in 2019.
Will fired Twitter staff find other jobs?
Most of the 3,700 employees fired by Twitter, including engineers, face a difficult job market given a weakening economy. Last week several other big technology-based companies announced job cuts, including 1,300 at Stripe and 650 at Lyft, both based in San Francisco like Twitter. Snap, Robinhood, Coinbase and other medium sized companies have also begun laying off staff. Amazon, which employs 1.5 million, has frozen hiring and so has Meta, parent of Facebook. Microsoft and Google expect to hire very few this year.
The impact of the tech company layoffs is already showing up in the housing market. For instance, San Jose and San Francisco, in the Silicon Valley, are seeing declines in home values.
Even in a good economy, middle managers and those in marketing, advertising, administration, and other non-technical roles, who are fired by Twitter, would have a tough time finding another job – or one that pays as much as they got at Twitter - especially if they are over 40 years old. This is also true of most engineers with undergraduate degrees, even from the top U.S. colleges. Those in managerial roles or who assist sales, marketing, and advertising teams receive higher pay than the non-technical staff. But, typically, such low-level engineers perform routine service roles - like explaining how products work - which do not require special skills. They can be easily replaced with lower cost, fresh graduates.
Likely the toughest situation is faced by Indians – and other foreigners – laid off by Twitter in the U.S., who are on temporary work visas, including those awaiting green cards. Around 650 of employees at Twitter and 325 at Stripe, who were fired last week, were on temporary works visas, according to Forbes. If they cannot find another job in the U.S. within 60 days they will have to return to India – or, if they have exceptional skills, they can get a special work visa and move to Canada.
At tech companies, especially the big ones, there is a hierarchy of several levels of engineers. Those at the top are part of teams that create and enhance a company’s products and services. Hence among engineers fired by Twitter, especially those with Ph.D.’s or exceptional self-taught skills, will likely soon find another job. Tech start-ups are eager to hire such talent though at a lower salary and with fewer benefits. At some companies, the top engineers may be given sizeable stock options which may turn out to be a major financial reward if the company grows rapidly or develops a crucial technology and is bought or goes public.
Perhaps to illustrate the importance of skills, in the context of Twitter’s plans for mass job cuts, the company’s adviser Krishnan recently tweeted to his nearly 170,000 followers that, “At the heart of what we do in this industry is engineering and people writing code. Everything else gets built on top.” So, engineers fired by Twitter, who have advanced skills, are likely to find another job even during the current cyclical downturn in the technology industry?
