Sriram Krishnan: The Indian-American 'helping' Elon Musk run Twitter

Who is Sriram Krishnan, the India-born tech expert who is reportedly in Elon Musk's "inner circle"?

Post the extensive firing of Twitter’s employees, Elon Musk has reportedly has put together a small team of his friends and confidantes who will be helping him implement his vision for Twitter. This core team includes Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-origin software engineer and former Twitter executive who left the company last year.

Earlier last week. Krishnan who presently works at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz or a16z tweeted that he was "helping out Mr. Musk temporarily". However, it is not yet clear in what capacity he will be helping Musk.

Still processing a truly surreal evening. A quick sample of the reactions from last night ( my favorite is of course when we were the #1 trend on Twitter with @elonmusk ). Cc @aarthir pic.twitter.com/rJPcUgaIeZ

— Sriram Krishnan - sriramk.eth (@sriramk) February 1, 2021

They appear to include Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-origin software engineer and former Twitter executive who left the company last year. Since then, his name has been trending in India, where many are bitter about the unceremonious sacking of former CEO Parag Agrawal and other Indian-origin executives. Krishnan was born in Chennai in what he described as a "very traditional" middle-income household. His life changed when he managed to convince his father to buy him a computer. "It cost about 60,000-70,000 rupees, a large part of my father's paycheck," he told in an interview. "I told him I would use it for my studies." However, he still did not have internet because a dial-up connection was expensive and unaffordable. Instead, he would buy coding books and teach himself the basics, and practice every night.

In 2007, Krishnan moved to the US. His big break came when one of his blog posts on Microsoft was noticed by a company executive, who then hired him and his wife who was also a software engineer in 2005.