The business story
Parag Agrawal (b. 1984, Ajmer, India) is a computer scientist — IIT Bombay B.Tech, Stanford PhD under Jennifer Widom — who joined Twitter in 2011, rose to Chief Technology Officer in 2017, and was named CEO in November 2021 when Jack Dorsey stepped down. His ~11-month tenure was consumed by Elon Musk’s $44B acquisition; Musk fired him on the day the deal closed in October 2022. Agrawal later co-founded Parallel Web Systems, building search/research infrastructure for AI agents.
Early life and background
Parag Agrawal was born in 1984 in Ajmer, Rajasthan. His father worked as a senior official connected to India's atomic-energy establishment and his mother taught economics, a household in which strong academic results were simply expected. He won a gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad in 2001, completed a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay in 2005, and earned a PhD in computer science at Stanford under Jennifer Widom, working on how databases handle uncertain data. Along the way he held research roles at Microsoft and Yahoo.
Building a career at Twitter
Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011, when it had around a thousand employees and an infrastructure prone to outages. He worked first on ads and revenue relevance, then on the machine-learning systems behind the ranked timeline and recommendations. In October 2017 he became chief technology officer, and in December 2019 he was given responsibility for Bluesky, Twitter's project to develop a decentralised social-networking standard.
On 29 November 2021, Jack Dorsey stepped down and the board voted unanimously to make Agrawal CEO. Few observers had expected it. He took over a company long criticised for growth and share performance that lagged its influence, and began reorganising product and engineering. Within hours, critics circulated a 2010 tweet of his; he had said at the time that it quoted a comedy sketch by Aasif Mandvi.
In 2022 Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter for about $44 billion, then tried to withdraw, disputing Twitter's figures on spam accounts. Twitter sued in Delaware, and Musk ultimately closed on the original terms on 27 October 2022, firing Agrawal and other senior executives that day. Agrawal had been CEO for just under eleven months. In March 2024 he and three former colleagues sued for more than $128 million in severance; the case was reportedly settled in 2025 on undisclosed terms.
