Who is Aravind Srinivas, CEO who challenged Elon Musk over USAID funding

Aravind Srinivas recently challenged Elon Musk to stop him from raising $500 billion from USAID. The post comes amid calls to shut down the federal agency

Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin CEO of AI search engine Perplexity AI, is no stranger to controversy. Recently, he openly challenged Tesla CEO Elon Musk, daring him to prevent him from securing a massive funding amount from a US federal agency.  

 

The challenge followed an unprecedented shutdown of USAID, which occurred just days after President Donald Trump described the agency as “corrupt".

 

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Srinivas said, "Considering raising $500 billion from USAID. Funding secured. Stop me if you can @elonmusk What is USAID?"

 

Meanwhile, a federal judge issued a temporary order on Friday, halting the administration's plan to place 2,200 USAID employees on paid leave.

 

Who is Aravind Srinivas?

 

Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Perplexity AI, an AI-driven search engine backed by high-profile investors, including Jeff Bezos.

 

Srinivas completed his engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, where he earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering. He then pursued a PhD in Computer Science from the renowned University of California, Berkeley. It was during this time that his interest in artificial intelligence grew, leading him to take on a four-month research internship at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

 

Following this, Aravind had a five-month research internship at DeepMind, another AI company, before spending a year in a similar role at Google.

 

After completing his PhD, Aravind returned to OpenAI in 2021 as a research scientist for a year. In August 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI alongside Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, and Johnny Ho. Aravind describes Perplexity AI as having “built the world's first generally available conversational answer engine that directly answers questions about any topic.”

 

The company is supported by prominent investors, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos. Aravind himself is an angel investor, having invested in several AI firms since 2023.