Indian geniuses from IITs are currently leading a few of the biggest tech companies in the world right now. These IIT graduates are hired with massive salaries and a long list of perks. One such IIT graduate was hired at a Rs 100 crore salary package but he was fired within a year. The IIT graduate man hasn’t made much public appearance since he was fired from a Rs 100 crore job but as per a latest report by Bloomberg, the man along with other fired executives is now seeking over Rs 1000 crore as severance pay. The IIT graduate that we are talking about is Parag Agarwal who made it to the headlines when he was hired as Twitter CEO. When the IIT Bombay graduate Parag Agarwal was hired, his salary was around Rs 8 crore apart from the restricted stock units valued at around Rs 94 crore. Overall, the IITians’ salary package was more than Rs 100 crore. IIT graduate Parag Agarwal was fired after Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk in a massive deal. To recall, Musk publicly vowed to withhold the severance of the fired high-paid employees to recoup a huge chunk from the 44 billion dollar deal.
Parag Agarwal along with other fired executives of Twitter have now sued platform’s owner Elon Musk for allegedly stiffing them for more than Rs 1000 crore in severance payments. “Under Musk’s control, Twitter has become a scofflaw, stiffing employees, landlords, vendors, and others. Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him,” lawyers said in the 38-page complaint filed on behalf of Parag Agarwal and other executives.
Parag Agarwal was reportedly entitled to get around Rs 400 crore as severance pay. Born in Ajmer, Parag Agrawal was part of a well-educated family. His father was a senior official in the Indian Department of Atomic Energy and his mother is a retired Economics professor. Agrawal completed his graduation from IIT Bombay in 2005 after securing 77 all India rank (AIR). Later he went to the United States to pursue a PhD in computer science at Stanford University.
Before joining Twitter in 2011, Agrawal did internships at Microsoft Research and Yahoo. After working at Twitter for around 6 years, he was appointed as chief technology officer following the departure of Adam Messinger.
Parag Agarwal is now reportedly venturing into the AI segment and has already secured big funding of Rs 249 crore. IIT graduatel’s startup is reportedly building software for developers of large language models, popularised by OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. As per the report, Vinod Khosla-led Khosla Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI, led the funding in Agrawal’s company. Apart from this, Index Ventures and First Round Capital, also reportedly participated in the deal.
