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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Why did Twitter pick Agrawal for their CEO. I hadn't read anything about him before Mudge's revelations and every single thing I've read since has not been kind to him. He seems to be doing a really bad job navigating this event and nobody appears to have any respect for the guy.

But you don't get to be CEO of a company the size of Twitter if you are this bad at managing. So, what's going on?

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I've wondered the same thing. He had one of the most epic upward trajectories of anyone ever going from rank and file to CEO of a multibillion dollar company. Did he even have any other job on his resume?

I assume he has some connections that let him shoot up through the ranks. I think his wife is a general partner at a16z, maybe that has something to do with it? But a lot of people fit that bill who might want to get their bestie listed as CEO

His LinkedIn "Experience" sure is unusual; seems like he basically held a few internships until joining Twitter as an engineer. 10 years later, he's CEO.

To be honest this whole thing seems overblown to me, Zatko is complaining that the board weren't aware that Twitter had massive security holes. There is one small problem with this accusation. Twitter's board hired famous ethical hacker Mudge to tackle their security issues. Maybe Zatko will eviscerate Mudge's failings under oath, but that doesn't get you very far since Zatko is Mudge*.

Zatko was hired by the CEO (Dorsey) and reported to the CEO and CTO, not the board.

Zatko says an inaccurate and misleading security report was going to be made to the board at their Dec 9/21 meeting and he was able to stop it. Agrawal let the report go to the board's Risk Committee a week later.

Zatko then reported that the Risk Committee meeting report was fraudulent (because of the inaccuracies?) and was fired two weeks later. Twitter then paid him $7 million to shut up but an NDA can't block an SEC whistleblower complaint.

I took all that information from this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/t...

Yes, but if you read his complaint, he makes clear direct statements that Agrawal lied about things that are clearly jdugement calls, so he's already established himself as over-reaching. It's also worth noting $7m is not a big severence for this kind of departure - Swisher weighed in on this and her reaction to 7m was "that's not a big severence for this sort of thing", let alone to cover up wrongdoing.

Maybe Jack saw a shitstorm on the horizon, and Agrawal was naive or willing enough to become the patsy?

Maybe every other possible executive at the company knew how to read the tea leaves? A lot of people don't want to be company CEOs because it's a lot more visible and higher-pressure than merely being CXO or SVP of X.

Also can carry serious criminal liability via Enron Response Regulation Sarbanes Oxley "The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires the CEO and CFO of publicly traded companies to issue a statement certifying that the accompanying financial statements and disclosures fairly present, in all material respects, the operations and financial condition of the company."

Has that ever come up in practice, particularly for a company the size of Twitter?

No. We've had a generation of tech companies with Unparalleled relative lobbying power in DC rewrite the rules in Non-GAAP accounting. The pendulum swings both far and fast.

He runs the company himself without any interference from Jack, how is he a patsy?

That separation is what we call "plausible deniability."

"How did person C get this position? Oh he's just a fall guy for person D." will start to be believable to me when I see it happen in the real world at least once. So far it's only something I've seen in Game of Thrones and Japanese Animes.

So, Big Head is running Twitter?

Reminds me of when GM got their first woman CEO right ahead of a massive scandal.

He's Indian. Just like all the other tech companies that put Indian's in charge, it's to get more access to India. The next billion users.

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