Less than three months after succeeding Jack Dorsey as CEO of Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), Parag Agrawal is taking time off for paternal leave.
What Happened: The Washington Post reported Agrawal’s absence is for an unspecified period of “a few weeks.” Twitter’s corporate policy for parental leave, regardless of the employee’s gender, is 20 weeks.
Agrawal didn't name an interim CEO to serve while he was away from the office, noting he planned to stay in touch with his executive team during his absence.
This will be the second child for Agrawal and his wife Vineeta Agarwala, who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads investments for the firm’s bio fund across therapeutics, diagnostics and digital health. Twitter declined to say whether Agrawal took parental leave in 2019 when his first child was born, although Agarwala tweeted at the time that her husband was home with her during her postpartum period.
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Why It Matters: Paternity leave continues to be a polarizing issue in the tech world. Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg made headlines in 2015 when he took two months off for paid paternity leave, while Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian stated the 16 weeks he took in 2017 enabled him to support his wife, tennis star Serena Williams, after she suffered near-fatal complications during childbirth.
On the flip side, Palantir (NYSE:PLTR) co-founder and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale berated Spotify Technology S.A. (NYSE:SPOT) for its paternity leave policy by claiming “any man in an important position who takes six months of leave for a newborn is a loser.” And in 2020, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk opted to give his then-partner Grimes, a Canadian singer-songwriter, the responsibility of caring for their newborn son, claiming that “right now there’s not much I can do” because “babies are just eating and pooping machines.”
Photo: Courtesy of Twitter
