Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top executives were ousted moments after Tesla owner and billionaire Elon Musk acquired the social media platform in a $44 billion takeover deal.
Agrawal took over as the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter in 2021 after founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey resigned
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top executives were ousted moments after Tesla owner and billionaire Elon Musk acquired the social media platform in a $44 billion takeover deal.
Agrawal, 38, took over as the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter in 2021 after founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey resigned. Agrawal worked at the social media platform as the Chief Technical Officer before that.
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.
While the move to remove Agrawal was expected from Musk, the Indian-origin Twitter CEO and the two other executives won't be leaving empty-handed.
According to Bloomberg report, Agrawal will get his 100 per cent unvested equity awards.
Overall, Twitter's top executives are likely to make a total of $88 million.
Among them, Agrawal is likely to receive the largest payout of about $42 million, largely due "to the entirety of his shares vesting upon his firing".
The estimate includes a year's worth of Parag's base salary plus accelerated vesting of all equity awards, as reported by the news agency Reuters.
The fired executives, including Agrawal, Ned Segal, Sean Edgett, Sarah Personette and Vijaya Gadde are covered by the ‘golden parachute clause’ signed between Twitter and Musk's X Holdings.
Besides, Twitter's chief financial officer Ned Segal, is set to receive $25.4 million and Vijaya Gadde, the chief legal officer, will be richer by $12.5 million after firing.
During his promotion from CTO to CEO, Agrawal reportedly received a compensation worth more than $30.3 million.
That said, not just the top executives, it was reported that Musk is also likely to cut 75% of Twitter’s workforce. He, however, told Twitter employees during his visit to its headquarters that he is not going to lay off the staff.
Twitter in April this year accepted Musk’s proposal to buy the social media platform. However, the Tesla CEO soon tried backing out of the $44-billion deal, alleging that the company failed to adequately disclose the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.
On Thursday, a day before acquiring Twitter, Musk wrote a message to reassure advertisers that social messaging services wouldn’t devolve into “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk said in his note.