How Parag Agrawal’s Refusal to Shut Down Account Tracking Elon Musk’s Private Jet Led to Twitter Takeover
- A new book by Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner, out Feb, 20, reveals that the current owner “unsuccessfully petitioned”the former CEO in January 2022, to remove @ElonJet run by a student at University of Central Florida.
Elon Musk began trying to acquire Twitter after then CEO Parag Agrawal denied his request to shut down an account that tracked his private jet, according to “Battle for the Bird,” a new book by Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner. The account — @ElonJet — run by Jack Sweeney, used publicly available information to track the private jet. The student at the University of Central Florida runs many accounts that track high-profile people like Taylor Swift, who recently threatened to sue him.
The book, due out on Feb. 20, includes “various anecdotes about Musk’s struggles to retain ‘anxious’ advertisers and other tales of his tumultuous tenure,” according to Mediate, a news website focusing on politics and the media. In an excerpt published in Bloomberg News, Musk “unsuccessfully petitioned” Agrawal in January 2022, to remove the account. Shortly after Agrawal denied his request, Musk started buying Twitter shares, Wagner wrote.
This “accumulation of Twitter stocks” by Musk “led to ongoing conversations with Dorsey,” and his “seeking a spot on the company’s board of directors,” But when that didn’t work out, he “began pursuing purchasing Twitter outright, with Dorsey’s encouragement. He acquired the company now known as X for $44 billion. He then sacked Agarwal, along with policy lead Vijaya Gadde, and CFO Ned Segal. He also removed Sweeney’s handle. However, he still posts travel data of Musk’s plane on other social networking sites.
Agrawal had replaced founder Jack Dorsey as CEO on Nov. 29, 2021. Dorsey was a long-serving engineer at the company and had previously risen to the rank of chief technology officer. In October last year, Musk was ordered to pay $1.1 million in legal fees to Agrawal, Gadde and Segal. The trio had sued the company in April for allegedly failing to pay for their legal bills.
Before he was appointed CEO, Agrawal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, had spent a decade with Twitter. In 2005, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Stanford University to pursue a doctorate in computer science. “There, he joined a research group focused on databases, which let computers store and mine large amounts of digital information, The New York Times said in his profile.
He joined Twitter in October 2011 as a Distinguished Software Engineer after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His early work on the use of artificial intelligence to increase the relevance of tweets on Twitter timelines was well recognized. He was appointed CTO in 2017. He succeeded Adam Messinger, who left the company in December 2016.