7 Things to Know About Twitter's New CEO

The new CEO received an undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Agrawal then completed a PhD in philosophy and computer science at Stanford University between 2005-2012, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2006, Agrawal joined Microsoft for a brief four-month research role before moving on to research positions at Yahoo and AT&T, according to LinkedIn. Agrawal first arrived at Twitter in 2011, just months after Dorsey returned as CEO following his removal from the top position in 2008.

When Agrawal started at Twitter, he reportedly worked on a project related to increasing the relevance of users’ tweets on their timelines and audience growth. He then received the title “distinguished engineer” for his impact on audience growth, according to Forbes. Agrawal was named CTO in 2018, nearly seven years after joining the company.

As CTO, Agrawal focused on “scaling a cohesive machine learning and AI approach,” across Twitter’s consumer and infrastructure team, a spokesperson previously told CNBC. Agrawal spoke in some detail on Twitter’s efforts to use AI to detect bot accounts and label potentially harmful content with the Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson.

Since 2019, Argawal has been involved in Bluesky, a project funded by Twitter aimed at creating a decentralized social media standard. Though details around Bluesky remain scarce, the project named its first leader, Jay Graber, earlier this year. Dorsey has previously described Bluesky as the “standard for the public conversation layer of the internet.”

In his resignation letter, Dorsey said Agrawal had been unanimously appointed by Twitter’s board and had been his personal pick to lead the position for some time. “My trust in him [Agrawal] as our CEO is bone deep,” Dorsey said.

Former Twitter employee speaking with the Wall Street Journal similarly described Agrawal as a “close friend” to Dorsey.

Just hours after being named CEO, some critics pointed to Agrawal’s previous statement on Twitter’s response to handling misinformation as evidence of censorship against conservatives. Specifically, critics pointed to a 2020 interview Agrawal gave to the MIT Technology Review in which he said Twitter’s “role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation.”