Parag Agrawal, an IIT-Bombay graduate, has replaced Jack Dorsey as the new chief executive officer of social media giant Twitter and at 37 is the youngest CEO in the global top 500 companies.
Agrawal joins the famous club of Indian-origin Silicon Valley CEOs which includes Sundar Pichai at Google and Satya Nadella, who heads Microsoft.
“I’ve decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders,” Dorsey said in a statement on Monday.
Agrawal, who’s served as Chief Technology Officer since 2017, has been with Twitter for more than a decade. He had been in charge of strategy involving artificial intelligence and machine learning and led projects to make tweets in users’ timelines more relevant to them.
Dorsey said in an email he published on Twitter that Agrawal has been his choice to lead the company “for some time given how deeply he understands the company and its needs.”
Parag Agrawa,l who is also a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, is a couple of months younger than Meta Platform Inc. (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Dorsey, 45, was serving as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. He will remain a member of the board until his term expires at the 2022 meeting of stockholders, the company said.
Dorsey was nearly ousted last year when Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had sought to replace him. Elliott Management founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public companies. Singer called for Dorsey to step down as CEO of one of them before the investment firm reached a deal with Twitter’s management.
Elliott issued a statement on Monday’s news, noting that its collaboration with Jack and Twitter over the past couple of years has been productive.
“Twitter is now executing against an ambitious multi-year plan to dramatically increase the company’s reach and value, and we look forward to the next chapter of Twitter’s story,” the company’s managing partner Jesse Cohn and senior portfolio manager Marc Steinberg said.
