PayPal, the online payment-processing major, has fired its Indian-origin strategy executive Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal after he posted a series of offensive tweets targeting senior colleagues in a late-night Twitter outburst over the weekend.
As the insulting and incoherent tweets surfaced, PayPal announced: “Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance.” PayPal had hired Agrawal as its Vice President of Strategy just two months ago.
In his tweets, while attending a Jazz festival in New Orleans, Agrawal slammed a senior colleague, Vice President for Global Communications Christina Smedley, calling her a “useless middle level manager” and using an expletive for her. Another tweet targeted PayPal retail chief Don Kingsborough.
Agrawal, however, disputed that PayPal had fired him, asserting that he had already quit the firm on his own. “PS the tweet from paypal is factually correct but utterly misleading. I resigned before the events of Friday night,” he said in a Sunday tweet.
VentureBeat, the tech website, quoted the San Francisco-based Agrawal as saying that he decided to leave PayPal prior to taking a vacation to New Orleans on Friday. “But late Friday night and early Saturday morning, he took to voice some of his frustrations, in the process insulting some of his coworkers,” it added.
The tweets have since been deleted, but not before Business Insider and Valleywag publicised the outburst.
Agrawal said he never intended for the messages to be made public, VentureBeat reported, adding that he also indicated that he was using a new Android phone that he was not familiar with. He, however, did not offer an apology for the nature of his tweets.
PayPal, while conceding that Agrawal had given notice for leaving, has been cited as saying that the insults were grounds for Agrawal’s immediate termination. Stating that he was looking forward to his next business venture, a startup called reDesign Mobile, Agrawal told the tech website: “Paypal was not a fit for what I want to do. By starting reDesign mobile I can build exactly the company I want at the pace I want.”