IIT Graduate With 100 Crore Salary Was Fired By Elon Musk, Now Has His Own AI Company
IIT graduates are now running some of the world’s largest tech companies and one such Indian-origin tech professional has an impressive salary package of ₹Elon Musk fired 100 crore. X, formerly known as Twitter, was acquired by Elon Musk in a deal worth $44 billion. After becoming the new owner of the social media platform, Musk made some major changes in the operations and he started by firing the company’s CEO. At that time, X was headed by an IIT graduate who made headlines on social media platforms when he was hired as the company’s CEO. With an IIT-JEE All India Rank (AIR) of 77, the man we are talking about is Parag Agarwal. He garnered considerable media attention when he was hired as the CEO of Twitter. His salary is approximately ₹8 crore, supplemented by restricted stock units worth approximately ₹94 crore, totaling over ₹100 crore.
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Why Parag Agarwal was fired
According to a book by Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner, Parag refused Elon Musk’s request to block the billionaire’s private jet tracking account. This was before the Twitter acquisition deal. Shortly after Musk joined Twitter, he fired Parag Agarwal and the billionaire’s private jet tracking account was blocked.
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Life after Twitter
After being fired, Parag Agarwal is given travel rights ₹400 crore in severance pay, but he did not receive any compensation. As a result, Agarwal and other former Twitter executives filed a lawsuit against Musk, alleging that they were denied ₹1000 crore severance pay.
Parag Agarwal is currently making strides in the field of AI and he is said to have secured significant funding. ₹249 crore for his new venture. His startup focuses on building software for developers working with large language models, similar to the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Khosla Ventures, led by Vinod Khosla and an early backer of OpenAI, reportedly led the investment in Agarwal’s company. Index Ventures and First Round Capital also participated in the round.
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