Billionaire Elon Musk, who is now the new owner of Twitter, in his first order of business has sacked chief executive Parag Agrawal, as well as the company’s chief financial officer and its head of safety. Apart from the Indian-origin CEO, Mr Musk fired Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy and trust at Twitter and two more top executives. A report by Insider quoted sources as saying that Twitter and Musk formally closed on the billionaire’s offer to take the company private on Thursday evening by paying $54.20 per share, or approximately $44 billion.
However, the top executive will not be leaving empty-handed, said reports. As a part of the deal, Agrawal will vest 100% of his unvested equity awards, reported Bloomberg. According to research firm Equilar, this means that he will make an estimated $42 million, reported Reuters. The estimate includes a year’s worth of Parag’s base salary plus accelerated vesting of all equity awards. In 2021, Agrawal’s total compensation was $30.4 million, when he was the chief technology officer, according to Twitter’s proxy. As the CEO, Agrawal’s salary was reported to be $1 million annually.
Parag Agrawal took over the Twitter CEO role in November last year after co-founder Jack Dorsey unexpectedly resigned. Agrawal’s run as CEO was quickly disrupted by Musk’s arrival as a major shareholder and increasingly vocal antagonist of its current leadership. The two had not been on good terms and none of it was hidden from the public eye.
When Musk made his desire to buy Twitter public in April this year, there were immediate buzz that Agrawal will be fired. And research firm Equilar had calculated how much he will get if that happens.
Musk had said in a securities filing on April 14 that he did not have confidence in Twitter’s management.
Several text messages during the lawsuit showed that Musk and Agrawal had a contentious exchange early on during the deal process after Musk asked his followers whether Twitter was “dying”. On April 9, Agarwal had written to Musk: “You are free to tweet ‘is Twitter dying?’ but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context.” Musk fired back: “What did you get done this week?”
On October 17, Musk and Twitter were expected in a face-off in Delaware’s Court of Chancery – wherein the social media company was set to seek an order directing Musk to close the deal for $44 billion. However, earlier this month, Musk proposed to proceed with his original $44 billion bid – calling for an end to the lawsuit by Twitter.
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