The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, fired thousands of employees last week, which caused a lot of trouble.
Many fired employees found out when they couldn’t get to their emails, which was a controversial way to do it. People were angry and frustrated, and some even sued Mr. Musk.
Some of the most critical people were fired right away.
In their place, Mr. Musk is said to have put together a small team of close friends and confidants and given them the job of making Twitter work the way he wants it to.
One of them seems to be Sriram Krishnan, a software engineer from India who used to work for Twitter but left the company last year.
Last week, Mr. Krishnan said on Twitter that he was “temporarily helping Mr. Musk.”
Since then, his name has been talked about in India, where many people are angry that former CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives with Indian roots were fired.
The relationship between Sriram Krishnan and Elon Musk
It’s also hard to say how close he is to Mr. Musk, but he has been called a member of Musk’s “inner circle” many times.
In an interview with Marina Mogilko, who runs a YouTube channel called Silicon Valley Girl, Mr. Krishnan said that he and his wife, Aarthi Ramamurthy, first met Mr. Musk when he helped with “something Twitter-related” a few years ago, and that’s how they “built a relationship.”
The couple also met Mr. Musk “several years ago” when they got a private tour of SpaceX’s headquarters in California.
But Mr. Musk’s appearance on a talk show hosted by the couple on Clubhouse in February 2021 was their most well-known interaction.
The wealthiest person in the world had just joined an invite-only app for an exclusive. So naturally, people on social media couldn’t believe it, and the show started to get a lot of attention.
As Mr. Musk talked about life on Mars, the possibility of aliens, and how one of his companies had wired up a monkey’s brain so he could play video games with his mind, the chatroom quickly reached the Clubhouse limit of 5,000 listeners at once.
Even though it’s now on other platforms, The Good Time Show remains a massive hit in the US.
On the company website, co-founder Marc Andreessen says that Mr. Krishnan is “possibly the only person in the world to have served in senior product positions in the three biggest social platforms of our time.” The 37-year-old has worked for Microsoft, Yahoo, Snap, Facebook, and Twitter.
On the other hand, Ms. Ramamurthy worked at both Facebook and Netflix before she started the two companies.
People have called them a “tech power couple” because they each have a lot of connections.
It all started in Chennai
Sriram Krishnan was born in the southern Indian city of Chennai into a middle-class family that he called “very traditional.”
His life changed when he talked his father into getting him a computer, a luxury in the late 1990s.
He couldn’t afford a dial-up connection but still needed the internet.
So, he bought books on how to code to teach himself the basics and work on them every night.
Mr. Krishnan met Ms. Ramamurthy online in 2002 while studying engineering at Anna University in Chennai. Before they met in person, the two people kept talking on Yahoo Messenger for a whole year.
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A few months later, a Microsoft executive saw one of Mr. Krishnan’s blog posts about the company and hired the couple in 2005. This was their chance to shine.
