Snoop Dogg to Indian-American inventor of e-mail, the race for Twitter CEO is as wild as Musk

Dear Mr. Musk, I am interested in the CEO position @Twitter. I have 4 degrees from MIT & have created 7 successful high-tech software companies. Kindly advise of the process to apply.

-- This is how an open letter (tweet) by Dr VA Shiva Ayyadurai reads as he blatantly flaunts his academic and professional experience to get the top seat at Twitter. 

In case you’re not upto date with the soap opera that is Elon Musk’s Twitter, the last episode found Musk running a poll asking people if they want him to continue being the CEO of Twitter (or “the Chief Twit” as he says). When 57% of the public voted in the negative, Musk still retained his position claiming that this would be the norm until he found someone competent (foolish) enough to run the Twitter office. 

Since then, people have been tweeting out their resumes and the ever-controversial Indian-American engineer Shiva Ayyadurai is the latest one in the race.

Who is Dr Shiva Ayyadurai? Garnering immense backlash for his medically unproven views during the pandemic, Ayyadurai is notorious as an anti-vaxxer. In fact, he even ran unsuccessfully to get a seat in the US Senate, one of his major campaign promises being firing Dr Anthony Fauci as Ayyadurai believes he is a “deep state actor”. 

After garnering only 3% of the votes as an independent candidate in the 2018 US Senate elections in Massachusetts, he ran as a Republican in the 2020 elections losing out in the primaries. 

• When he’s not busy talking against vaccines and pandemic regulations, Ayyadurai can be found floating around conspiracy theories on how he lost the 2020 primary as 1 million ballots in his favour were destroyed. His claims of election fraud have proven to be untrue after several fact checks. 

On February 2021, Ayyadurai was also suspended from Twitter, the very platform he now wants to become the CEO of. While it is a common belief that his unproven posts of alleged pseudoscience were the reason, he soon alleged local Massachusetts politicians and election officials to have orchestrated his suspension. 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. As Ayyadurai signs off in his own letter to Musk, “Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. The Inventor of Email.”

Did Ayyadurai really invent the e-mail? Ayyadurai made news in 2011 when he was the subject of an article in Time in which he claimed that he invented the e-mail in 1978 at the age of 14. He added that he registered the copyright for an e-mail application in August 1982. 

Since then, historians and tech experts have widely disputed his claims with the general consensus arguing that the e-mail was very much in use in the US in the early 1970s. When the now-defunct online media company Gawker Media published articles against his claims, Ayyadurai went on to sue them for defamation. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court. 

In general, the late American programmer Ray Tomlinson is widely recognised as the inventor of the e-mail as he initiated the first e-mail program on the ARPANET (the predecessor to the Internet) in 1971. 

But Ayyadurai continues to fight for his alleged truth. In fact, one of his websites literally has the domain name, “https://www.inventorofemail.com/”

A trip to the website is definitely educational to know more about this bizarre member of the Indian diaspora. There’s a justification on how his was the true e-mail unlike the one on the ARPANET followed by the racist trolling that he has endured for his claim. 

Surprisingly, even America’s most popular intellectual Noam Chomsky came to his defese in a 2012 lecture. To quote Chomsky, 

So, whether he did create the e-mail or not, that’s food for thought. But the world should probably be thinking about what Musk would be feeling about this. We have seen in the past few weeks how impulsive and bizarrely surprising the Tesla founder can be!

Snoop Dogg also jokes about running for Twitter CEO: Rapper and full-time cannabis smoker Snoop Dogg is known for his satirical hot takes on social media. This time around, he was pulling Musk’s leg by tweeting a similar poll asking, “Should I run Twitter?”.

The poll ended with a resounding yes from 81%. 

The tweet was so iconic that even the official handle of The Guinness Book of World Records tweeted, “biggest yes ratio in a twitter poll”!

YouTuber Mr Beast can be a potential candidate: With 122 million subscribers on YouTube, Jimmy Donaldson is a successful YouTuber, popularly known as Mr Beast. 

On December 23, Mr Beast too expressed his interest in running the blue bird as he tweeted, “Can I be the new Twitter CEO?”

To this, Musk replied, “it’s not out of the question”!

Who else is in the race? Posting an image of the glasses worn by The Matrix’s Morpheus with the shades reflecting him taking both the red and the blue pill, Matt Swider also announced his interest in serving as the Twitter CEO.

For the unacquainted, Swider went on to list out his achievements as “gained 1M followers helping people buy PS5” and “fought Twitter bots and scams more than you can imagine”. 

Grammy-winning DJ Swivel, Beyonce’s personal audio recording engineer, tagged K-pop group BTS’s Twitter handle tweeting that they should be joint CEOs with Musk!

While surprisingly, personalities like Kanye West and Donald Trump didn’t have a comment (both of them are anyway not on Twitter), Donald Trump Jr shared a fake news post announcing him as Musk’s successor in Twitter. 

The eldest child of Donald and Ivana Trump still tweeted, “This is unfortunately fake news, but would definitely be lit AF” followed by a barrage of fire emojis.

So, what about the actual Twitter CEO? Well, last we checked, Elon Musk was still the Chief Twit at Twitter, waiting for the time he finds someone 'foolish enough' to become the Twitter CEO.