Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has challenged Musk to "stop him if he can" from raising a sizeable donation for the federal agency.
As US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue to work towards their overhaul of the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID), an Indian-origin CEO has moved to defy this move. Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has challenged Musk to "stop him if he can" from raising a sizeable donation for the federal agency.
Days after Trump and Musk expressed their plan to shut down USAID, Srinivas took to social media platform X and said - "Considering raising $500B from USAID. Funding secured. Stop me if you can @elonmusk."
The Trump 2.0 administration's move to put around 2,200 USAID workers on administrative leave has received nationwide backlash. From February 7, 2025, onwards, all USAID workers across the globe were put on administrative leave and given a 30-day deadline to return.
On Friday, a federal judge ordered a pause on the administration's overhaul of the federal agency.
Several protests have also taken over Washington DC against this overhaul of USIAD. As per Trump and Musk, USAID is "run by a bunch of radical lunatics".
Aravind Srinivas's post also comes amid the deportation of several Indians from the United States.
Aravind Srinivas is one of the many Indian-origin CEOs in the United States. Srinivas, an alumnus of ITT Madras, is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI.
Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine, jointly developed by Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho.
After completing his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, Srinivas began his career as a research intern at OpenAI. He went on to hold similar positions at Google and DeepMind.
He returned to OpenAI as a research scientists and then moved on to create Perplexity AI in 2022.