This IITian Received a ₹100 Crore Salary Package from This Company but Was Soon Fired by Elon Musk. What Is He Doing Next? Discover His Story.
Studying at prestigious IIT colleges is a dream for any engineering student. Many tech companies around the world are headed by IIT graduates. It is believed that IITians possess extraordinary vision and strong decision-making skills that lead companies to new heights. Several examples support this, such as Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, who is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur. Companies pay hefty packages for their services. However, in recent months, an IIT graduate made headlines not for landing a job but for being fired from a ₹100 crore package job.
Parag Agarwal was hired by Twitter (now X) at a Rs 100 crore salary package. But he was fired within a year soon after the micro-blogging site was acquired by Elon Musk. After becoming the owner of X, Musk made drastic changes, starting with firing Parag Agarwal. Agarwal was the CEO of Twitter.
Parag Agarwal’s Salary Package At Twitter
Parag, an IIT Bombay graduate, was recruited by Twitter. He was given a direct salary of around Rs 8 crore with the added bonus of restricted stock units equating almost Rs 94 crore. Altogether, the IIT Bombay graduate’s remuneration package went over Rs 100 crore. Quite the earnings for an alum, isn’t it?
What is Parag Agarwal’s Doing
Parag Agarwal has mostly been inconspicuous since he lost his job that paid him about Rs 100 crore. Interestingly, recent news from Bloomberg suggests that Parag, along with other executives who were also let go, are currently advocating for severance packages that could run over Rs 1000 crore.
Parag Agarwal and a group of other former Twitter executives have instituted legal proceedings against Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, alleging that he has short-changed them to the tune of over Rs 1000 crore in severance pay. A detailed 38-page complaint has been lodged by their legal counsel, which charges Musk with running Twitter like an outlawed company, failing commitments to staff and suppliers, landlords among others. Their argument is that Musk laughs off regulations and employs his considerable wealth and clout to steamroll over any opposition. It’s been reported that Agarwal was due to receive severance pay in the region of some Rs 400 crores.
Who is Parag Agarwal?
Parag Agrawal hails from Ajmer. His father was a senior official in Indian Department of Atomic Energy and his mother is a retired professor.
Parag Agarwal Education
In 2005, Agrawal achieved an impressive all-India rank of 77 and graduated from the reputed IIT Bombay. Following his passion for knowledge and research, he then moved over to the United States. Here, he carried on his academic pursuits by enrolling in Stanford University for a PhD in computer science.
Before joining Twitter in 2011, he did his internship at Yahoo and Microsoft Research.
Parag Agarwal’s Current Job
There’s a buzz that Parag Agarwal is stepping into the fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence and has successfully bagged a whopping Rs 249 crore in funding. He aims to make significant contributions to the AI domain by providing useful tools for full-scale language model creators. This domain is familiar to many, thanks primarily to OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. From what’s shared in the grapevine, the financial support for Agarwal’s groundbreaking venture mainly comes from Khosla Ventures, steered by Vinod Khosla, a known advocate of OpenAI. To add to that, both First Round Capital and Index Ventures are rumoured to have joined the investors’ club in this round of funding.
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