Parag Agrawal (Hindi pronunciation: [pəˈɾaːɡ əɡɾəˈʋaːl]; born May 21, 1984)^[2] is an Indian-American software engineer and businessman who was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from November 2021 to October 2022.^[3]

Agrawal was born in Ajmer, Rajasthan.^[4][5] His father was a senior official in the Indian Department of Atomic Energy and his mother is a retired Economics professor from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute in Mumbai.^[6]

In 2001, he completed his final year of higher secondary education at Atomic Energy Junior College, Mumbai.^[7] In the same year, he secured a gold medal in the International Physics Olympiad held in Antalya, Turkey.^[8][9]

In 2005, Agrawal obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science and engineering from IIT Bombay.^[10] That year, he moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in computer science at Stanford University under the guidance of Jennifer Widom.^[11][12][13] His Stanford doctoral thesis, published in 2012, is titled "Incorporating Uncertainty in Data Management and Integration".^[14][15]

Agrawal held research internships at Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Research before joining Twitter as a software engineer in 2011.^[16] In October 2017, Twitter announced the appointment of Agrawal as chief technology officer following the departure of Adam Messinger.^[17] In December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that Agrawal would be in charge of Project Bluesky, an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol.^[18]

In an interview discussing the rise of misinformation on Twitter with MIT Technology Review in November 2020, while still Twitter CTO, when asked about freedom of speech regarding Twitter, Agrawal said: "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation ... [and to] focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."^[19]

On November 29, 2021, Dorsey announced that he was resigning as CEO of Twitter and that Agrawal was replacing him immediately.^[20][21][22] As CEO, Agrawal was awarded annual compensation of $1 million as well as stock compensation worth $12.5 million.^[11] Agrawal was fired as CEO once Elon Musk completed his acquisition of the company on October 27, 2022.^[23][24]

Agrawal is married to Vineeta Agarwala,^[11][25] general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.^[26] They have two children, born in 2018 and 2022.