Rakesh Agrawal's Epic Twitter Meltdown Leads To War Of Words With PayPal

Paypal Exec Out Of A Job After Crazy Twitter Tirade

Talk about burned bridges.

Rakesh "Rocky" Agrawal was an executive at PayPal until Friday, when he fired off a series of insulting tweets, including one that called a fellow PayPal exec a "piece of shit."

Agrawal quickly deleted the tweets and blamed a new phone, but nothing's ever truly deleted from the Internet. The posts were saved in a number of places, and you can take a look at some of them on the Valleywag website.

PayPal took to Twitter over the weekend to announce that Agrawal was gone. Then, Agrawal posted an image of a resignation email showing he had quit the e-commerce company before the Twitter war began.

In another deleted tweet, Agrawal apologized to PayPal boss David Marcus.

On Monday, Marcus made it clear he wasn't in the mood for an apology.

"When you attack and insult my team, you attack, and insult me and the rest of PayPal. I think the world of the people you've insulted. They are some of the best people I've worked with in my career, and I will not tolerate your mad rants any longer," Marcus wrote on the PayPal website.

If it ended there, this would be just another Twitter-gone-wrong story, maybe a cautionary tale like the "Cisco fatty" and others who've learned the hard way that social media posts can come back to bite you hard.

But in this case, the story was just beginning.

The incident led to an escalating war of words between Agrawal and his former employer, a series of digs at some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and a possible new company started by Agrawal that's apparently hiring right now... but don't bother sending in a resume.

It seems Agrawal is hiring people who follow scavenger-hunt-like clues on Twitter.

Employee 1 pic.twitter.com/x8L0rdsxAm

— Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) May 4, 2014

He's flaunting the fact that he's defying some Silicon Valley conventions, saying "None of my brilliant team would have been hired by google or FB" and "Everyone on my team (except Sophie) is 40 or older."

In his latest blog post, Marcus seems to suggest that what Agrawal really needs is help.

"Now...if you're a close friend of Rocky's and you're out there, I'd strongly suggest getting to him sooner rather than later, as his behavior is extremely worrisome," Marcus said.

People seem to be getting to Agrawal all right -- but not because they're worried. It's because they want jobs.

And that leads us to ask...

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