Agrawal will leave Twitter with $42 million, leaked texts detail his fallout with Musk

Though reports claim Twitter's former CEO Paraga Agrawal was 'escorted out' of the company's headquarters in San Fransico after entrepreneur and Twitter's new owner Elon Musk closed the deal, Agrawal will be leaving with a lucrative deal. 

Among the four executives who have been fired, Agrawal himself will receive the largest payout of $42 million due to the entirety of his shares and because he has been fired within 12 months of a change in control at the company. The provisions are disclosed in regulatory filings.

While Twitter's chief financial officer Ned Segal will receive a $25.4 million payout, its chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde will get $12.5 million. Sarah Personette, the chief customer officer, would get $11.2 million. 

Agrawal joined Twitter in 2011 when there were fewer than 1,000 employees. He became Twitter's chief technology officer in 2017 after co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down.

Agrawal-Musk fallout

That said, Agrawal's firing does not come as a surprise as he has been at loggerheads with the Tesla CEO the recent months. A series of leaked messages reveal how soured the relationship was between them.

In March after he acquired Twitter shares, Musk met with the Twitter board, including its founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, to discuss the company's future. Musk then announced he became Twitter's largest shareholder and accepted a seat on the company’s board.

Though they initially shared a warm relationship, things went sour when the mercurial Musk shared a list of the top 10 most-followed Twitter accounts with the caption, "Is Twitter dying?"

Agrawal messaged Musk the next day to say that the tweet wasn't helping the team. "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 you to provide [your] perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how [it’s] hurting our ability to do work … 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," Agrawal's text to Musk read, as revealed in a court filing last month. 

Musk snapped back: "What did you get done this week?" adding that he "was not joining the board. This is a waste of time." 

Musk also got back to Dorsey, who replied to him that "At least it became clear that you can't work together. That was clarifying." Musk acknowledged it.

He then abandoned the board seat, threatened a hostile takeover and ultimately agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, only to back out number of bots and spam accounts on the platform. 

Then in May, there was also this humiliating incident wherein Musk replied to Agrawal's long Twitter thread about spam content and how it affects user experience with a poop emoji to show his discontent.