Image Source: India Today
Sriram Krishnan is one of Elon Musk’s closest friends who works behind the scenes to run Twitter. The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, fired thousands of workers last week, which caused a lot of trouble.
Many employees found out they were fired when they couldn’t get to their emails, which was a controversial way to do it. So naturally, people were angry and upset about this, and some even sued Mr. Musk.
Some of the most influential people in the company were fired right away.
Instead, 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 these inner circle members seems to be Sriram Krishnan, a software engineer from India who used to work for Twitter until last year.
In a tweet last week, Mr. Krishnan said he was “temporarily helping Mr. Musk.”
Since then, his name has been talked about in India, where many people are upset that former CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives with Indian roots were fired.
How Musk and Sriram Krishnan got to know each other
It’s also hard to say how close he is to Mr. Musk, although many consider him to be in Musk’s “inner circle.”
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 this is how they “built a relationship.”
The couple also met Mr. Musk “a few years ago” when he gave them a private tour of SpaceX’s headquarters in California.
But Mr. Musk’s appearance on a talk shows that the couple hosted on Clubhouse in February 2021 was their most famous time together.
The richest person in the world had just shown up for an exclusive on an invite-only app. So, 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 it could play video games with its mind, the chatroom quickly reached the Clubhouse limit of 5,000 listeners at once.
The Good Time Show is a hit in the US, even though it is now on other platforms.
On the company’s 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 previously worked at Microsoft, Yahoo, Snap, Facebook, and Twitter.
On the other hand, Ms. Ramamurthy worked at both Facebook and Netflix before she started two businesses of her own.
People have called them a “tech power couple” because they know many people in the tech world.
The Chennai years
Sriram Krishnan was born in the city of Chennai in southern India into a middle-class family that he said was “very traditional.”
His life changed when he talked his father into buying him a computer, a luxury in the late 1990s.
He couldn’t pay for a dial-up connection, but he still needed the internet.
So, he bought books about coding to teach himself the basics and work on it every night.
In 2002, Mr. Krishnan met Ms. Ramamurthy online. At the time, he was studying engineering at Anna University in Chennai. Before they finally met, the two people talked on Yahoo Messenger for a whole year.
Read also: A timeline of the ten days of chaos on Twitter
A few months later, an executive at Microsoft saw one of Mr. Krishnan’s blog posts about Microsoft and hired the couple in 2005. This was a big break for them.
