‘Treat me like an engineer instead of CEO’, Parag Agrawal told Elon Musk

A new treasure trove of texts exchanged between Musk and Twitter executives like Agrawal and Jack Dorsey has now been leaked in the public domain.

New Delhi: Elon Musk told Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal recently that he does not want to be a boss, to which Agrawal replied that the Tesla CEO should also treat him like an engineer instead of a CEO.

A new treasure trove of texts exchanged between Musk and Twitter executives like Agrawal and Jack Dorsey has now been leaked in the public domain.

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In an early April conversation with Twitter CEO Agrawal, Musk admitted he doesn’t want to be a boss, reports TechCrunch.

“Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don’t think I should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems,” Musk told Agrawal.

“Treat me like an engineer instead of a CEO,” Agrawal replied.

Musk told him that he has tons of ideas, but “I just want Twitter to be maximum amazing”.

“I would like to understand the technical details of the Twitter codebase. This will help me calibrate the dumbness of my suggestions,” he wrote to Agrawal.

“I used to be CTO and have been in our codebase for a long time. So I can answer many, many of your questions,” Agrawal replied.

Agrawal told Musk that he is 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 to provide you with a perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how it is hurting our ability to do work. I would 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,” a defiant Agrawal told the Tesla CEO.

On April 26, Dorsey, Elon Musk and Agrawal got on a Google Hangout together to discuss the takeover, and their differences were visible in chats.

“At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clarifying,” Dorsey apparently said.

The leaked chats come at a time when both Twitter and Musk are engaged in a fierce legal battle that is slated to begin in the Delaware Court of Chancery in the US on October 17.