Global online payments provider PayPal said it has parted company with a recently hired executive after he sent out a series of disparaging and badly spelled remarks about colleagues on Twitter, including one telling a co-worker “duck you”.
Paypal tweeted on Saturday: “Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance.”
His expletive-laden and often incoherent tweets, since deleted, appeared to have been sent in the small hours from a jazz festival in New Orleans, reports The Guardian. Among other things, they specifically insulted Christina Smedley, vice president of global communications at PayPal.
One tweet said, “Duck you Smedley, you useless middle manager,” according to copies of the tweets from his @rakeshlobster account that were posted by the website Business Insider.
The Twitter anger continued after the split, with Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal accusing his former employer of a misleading announcement and claiming that he had already quit before his irate and often indecipherable tweets were sent.
Agrawal, whose Twitter profile still listed “Global strategy at PayPal” as his job on Sunday, tweeted that “the tweet from paypal is factually correct but utterly misleading. I resigned before the events of Friday night.”
Agrawal, who only joined PayPal as director of global strategy in March, later tweeted: “Day one of my next adventure? I am so ducking tired.”
He then appeared to claim the tweets were sent in error. “Last night I was using a new phone that I bought because I wanted to test experiences on android. Those messages were meant for a colleague,” the tech veteran tweeted.
“Note to self: don’t test a new phone when sleep deprived after working your ass off for 20 hours a day while on vacation,” he added.
He had already been critical of PayPal in the past, writing in a blogpost in 2012 that its point-of-sale service allowing customers to use PayPal to buy goods in stores was a “piece of s**t”.
