According to Kurt Wagner’s new book, published on February 20, the current owner “unsuccessfully petitioned” the former CEO in January 2022 to have @ElonJet, which is operated by a University of Central Florida student, removed.
According to “Battle for the Bird,” a new book by Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner, Elon Musk started attempting to buy Twitter after the company’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, rejected his request to close an account that tracked his private jet. The private jet was tracked by Jack Sweeney’s account, @ElonJet, using data that was made available to the public. The University of Central Florida student manages numerous accounts that follow well-known individuals, including Taylor Swift, who recently threatened to sue him.
According to Mediate, a news website that focuses on politics and the media, the book, which is scheduled for release on February 20, contains “various anecdotes about Musk’s struggles to retain ‘anxious’ advertisers and other tales of his tumultuous tenure.” According to a passage from Bloomberg News, Musk “unsuccessfully petitioned” Agrawal to have the account deleted in January 2022. Wagner stated that shortly after Agrawal turned down Musk’s request, Musk began purchasing Twitter stock.
Musk “began pursuing purchasing Twitter outright, with Dorsey’s encouragement” after his “accumulation of Twitter stocks” “led to ongoing conversations with Dorsey” and his “seeking a spot on the company’s board of directors.” However, that plan fell through. For $44 billion, he bought the business that is now X. He then fired CFO Ned Segal, policy lead Vijaya Gadde, and Agarwal. He also removed Sweeney’s handle. However, he still posts travel data of Musk’s plane on other social networking sites.
Agrawal had replaced founder Jack Dorsey as CEO on Nov. 29, 2021. Dorsey was a long-serving engineer at the company and had previously risen to the rank of chief technology officer. In October last year, Musk was ordered to pay $1.1 million in legal fees to Agrawal, Gadde and Segal. The trio had sued the company in April for allegedly failing to pay for their legal bills.
Agrawal, an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay alumnus, worked for Twitter for ten years prior to being named CEO. He relocated to the United States in 2005, where he enrolled at Stanford University to work towards a computer science doctorate. “He joined a database-focused research group there, where computers could store and process vast amounts of digital data,” according to The New York Times’ profile of him.
After earning his doctorate in computer science from Stanford University, he started working at Twitter in October 2011 as a Distinguished Software Engineer. His early research on using AI to make tweets on Twitter timelines more relevant was widely acknowledged. In 2017, he was named CTO. He took over for Adam Messinger, who departed the business in December 2016.
