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Fake fired Twitter worker ‘Rahul Ligma’ is a real engineer with an AI data startup used by Harvard
May 16, 2025
The morning after Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), reporters encountered two men with boxes outside the company’s headquarters. One introduced himself as recently laid-off Twitter engineer “Rahul Ligma.”
His real name is Rahul Sonwalkar but the prank went viral. He piled on his character’s notoriety when he went to the Bahamas to play a laid-off FTX worker right after that cryptocurrency exchange imploded.
While he never worked for X or FTX, he is actually very much a techy. He spent several years working as an engineer at Uber.
He even went through Y Combinator at that time working on a logistics startup that he later scrapped before pivoting.
The now 27-year-old wants to draw attention to his more serious endeavor: Julius, the AI data analyst startup he founded about two years ago.
The tool, which can analyze and visualize extensive datasets and perform predictive modeling from natural language prompts, has attracted over two million registered users.
“I wanted to build something that would make data science very accessible to everyone,” Sonwalker told TechCrunch.
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