PayPal’s Rakesh Agrawal gets fired following offensive tweets

It’s no fun to do the Internet equivalent of the walk of shame. Rakesh Agrawal, the recently hired director of strategy for the giant firm PayPal, apparently indulged in a Twitter rant that dissed new colleagues and showed his pronounced inability to type with his thumbs. Being at the raucous, boozy Jazz Fest in New Orleans may not have helped. In the wee hours of Saturday, tweets bearing the name Rakesh Agrawal maligned PayPal communications vice president Christina Smedley.

PayPal’s new director of strategy Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal is interviewing. The company publicly confirmed that the relatively new hire is “no longer with the company” after sending a series of bizarre and insulting tweets last night. Agrawal joined PayPal in March, after working for many years as a consultant to payments and commerce companies. Hired as their director of strategy, he said at the time that he would be tasked with “help[ing] small businesses and entrepreneurs understand online commerce and payments.” (The hire was made despite previous disparaging comments from Agrawal about the company’s point-of-sale system, which he presumably had to educate small businesses about.)