What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
What TV doesn't, print can't; we deliver.
On April 5 a day after billionaire Elon Musk declared that he had become largest shareholder in Twitter, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s then Chief Executive welcomed him to the board saying he was excited about the development. Musk refused to be part of the board. The drama that unfolded in the next six months is stuff of legends. It ended on October 28, when the eccentric Tesla CEO completely overtaking the micro-blogging site ushering in both fears and euphoria among different sections of people.
A recent dump of purported leaked chats doing the rounds on Twitter throws some light into what kind of a relationship Agrawal and Musk shared in those troubled six months.
What one can gather from the chats that there was willingness at least on the surface to try and work it out. The chats are laced with drama with each party trying to outsmart the other.
Take this chunk of the leaked chats for example –
Elon Musk: I interface way better with engineers who are able to do hardcore programming than with program manager / MBA types of people.
Parag Agrawal: in our next convo – treat me like an engineer instead of CEO and lets see where we get to. I’ll know after that convo who might be the best engineer to connect you to.
Elon Musk: Frankly, I hate doing mgmt (management) stuff. I kinda don’t think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems.
In one of the exchanges, Musk made it clear that he didn’t like “MBA types” and preferred communicating with those with hard-core coding skills. To which Parag responded that Musk should try and talk to him like an engineer and not a management person.
One of the exchanges with Musk had a feeling that Parag was moving “too slow” and “trying to please the wrong people.” Founder of Twitter and former CEO Jack Dorsey tried to work it out between the two. Explaining Parag’s working style to Musk, Dorse said he worked better with clear direction. “He is great at getting things done when when tasked with specific direction,” he told Musk.
It’s also clear that Parag was struggling to accept Musk’s antics on Twitter. “You are free to tweet “is Twitter dying?” or anything else about Twitter – but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I’d like to you provide you perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how it hurting our ability to do work. I hope the AMA will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you – and I’d like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don’t get distracted, but we aren’t there right now.”
After taking over Twitter, Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal and its policy chief Vijaya Gadde, along with Twitter CFO Ned Segal. He gave away very generous severance packages to the fired members.
Here are the screenshots of the purported leaked chats
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Source: All tweets sourced from https://twitter.com/TechEmails
