Indian talent in America got a shout-out from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk after Parag Agrawal was appointed as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Twitter on Monday.
“USA benefits greatly from Indian talent!” tweeted the Tesla boss.
He was replying to a tweet on Indian-origin persons leading some of the world’s top tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft, Adobe and IBM.
Parag Agrawal is the latest India-born talent to be tapped to lead a major US tech firm, following the likes of Google-parent Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants. (Congrats, @paraga!),” tweeted CEO Patrik Collison.
Elon Musk’s tweet on Indian talent in the US was in response to this tweet. His recognition of Indian talent has collected over 45,000 ‘likes’ and over 8,000 retweets.
While Shantanu Narayen is the CEO of Adobe, Arvind Krishna leads IBM.
“This is one pandemic that we are happy & proud to say originated in India. It’s the Indian CEO Virus… No vaccine against it (sic),” industrialist Anand Mahindra tweeted.
Agrawal took over as the new head of Twitter after the social media giant’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, announced that he was leaving the company.
Parag Agrawal was Twitter’s chief technology officer before he replaced Jack Dorsey in the top post. Dorsey said he would remain a member of the board through until around May to help with the transition.
Agrawal joined the company in 2011 and has served as chief technology officer since October 2017, where he was responsible for the network’s technical strategy.
He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay.
