All about Hyderabad’s Vijaya Gadde, a Twitter executive fired by Elon Musk

In 2011, Viajaya Gadde joined Twitter. She earned nearly $17 million in 2021 as Twitter’s chief legal officer and approximately $7.3 million in 2020.

Hyderabad: Just moments after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk sacked top officials from the company. Among those fired are the legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde and chief executive officer Parag Agrawal.

The sacked individuals were earlier accused by Musk of misleading him and Twitter investors over the real figures around the bot and fake accounts. In April, when news of Musk’s bid to buy Twitter came out, he publicly tweeted against Gadde, attacking her for the way Twitter is run and blocking certain people on the social media platform.

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He even attacked her for her role in banning Donald Trump from the microblogging site.

Who is Vijaya Gadde? 

Vijaya Gadde was born in Hyderabad and she moved to the United States at the age of 3.  She completed her bachelor’s degree of science in industrial and labour relations from Cornell University in New York. She went to New York University to study Law. She also worked as a senior director in the legal department of Juniper Networks.

In 2011, she joined Twitter. She earned nearly $17 million in 2021 as Twitter’s chief legal officer and approximately $7.3 million in 2020, according to a Bloomberg Law report. Her key responsibilities in the firm reportedly concerned dealing with tweets that involved fake news and harassment.

In 2018, she came into the limelight in India when a picture of her standing with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey holding a poster that read “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy” went viral. Some critics declared the sentiment discriminatory against Brahmins. She was forced to apologise in a series of tweets.

Why was Gadde fired? 

After Elon Musk stated that he wanted to buy Twitter, Gadde found herself in the spotlight owing to memes that were critical of the platform’s policies. Musk himself shared one of the memes, which was a reference to a Joe Rogan podcast from 2019 where Gadde and Jack Dorsey discussed Twitter’s moderation efforts.

He repeatedly voiced support for the Republican Party. Musk declared himself a free speech absolutist and called Twitter’s permanent Trump ban “a mistake”. This solidified that he and Gadde would not get along.