There is no vulgarity Gurbaksh Singh Chahal has not used against Twitter after a steady build-up of drama that began in June this year. Silicon Valley’s teen prodigy, who became a millionaire at 18, toppled from grace a decade ago when he was accused of battery by two women and hit by lawsuits from former employees. But that has not stopped him from declaring war on Twitter, which has effectively shut down his news media venture, BNN.
Since 29 June, Twitter has taken down hundreds of accounts linked to BNN for allegedly spamming and attempting to manipulate the platform and user experience.
Gurbaksh Chahal, or ‘G’ as he calls himself, says he has been shortchanged. He claims he spent $2 million via his non-profit foundation in Twitter advertising and that his news company helped the platform generate $17 million in revenue. And that’s not all: he has accused Twitter of stealing $10 million from his non-profit organisation Chahal Foundation.
Chahal—who according to a former employee referred to himself as ‘the Indian Brad Pitt’—is not shy about venting his anger or spewing abuse. He’s been posting a steady stream of threatening tweets against the microblogging site and its top executives.
“I’m gonna **$ @Twitter so bad…. It’s war now…You **#** with the wrong Punjabi lion,” reads one of his many rants. In another outburst, he instructed tech recruiters to deny jobs to current Twitter employees looking for opportunities.
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G vs Twitter
Chahal’s entry into the news media business has been rocky at best. Earlier this year, he decided to launch his breaking news platform called BNN, with plans to roll out a television news channel by 2023. As part of a soft launch, he unleashed more than 200 Twitter accounts by May 2022, all linked to the news organisation’s main handle, @BNNBREAKING. Each account would cover news from one country.
Incidentally, the primary handle, @BNNBREAKING, was formerly owned by a Netherlands-based agency called BNO News since 2015. However, Chahal in a deal with the agency acquired one of BNO’s Twitter accounts and renamed it BNN.
BNN was expected to go live on 17 July with its own portal and mobile application. But it hasn’t taken off.
From 29 June, Twitter started systematically suspending the accounts of BNN for “spam and platform manipulation”. Chahal claims this was done even though all the accounts had previously been verified by Twitter.
The final deathblow came on 6 October when the last and main account @BNNBreaking was also suspended by Twitter. Chahal’s team then started using his personal account to post news and later shifted to tweeting from @ChahalNonProfit handle, which has now been suspended as well. BNN News is back to tweeting from Chahal’s personal account.
A spitting-mad Chahal has threatened to sue Twitter. For him, Twitter is a news monopolist, unilaterally censoring accounts. He sees himself as the lone warrior fixing all that he thinks is wrong with the social media platform. And he wouldn’t just ‘delete’ his account.
I wish people realized this if it was really just about switching social networks. I would give @Twitter no money. It's about the systemic damage Twitter causes to society that I'm fixing.
These guys are a PURE monopoly in the real-time news distribution business. https://t.co/QEDAQRTyW6
— Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) October 7, 2022
He lobs crass words like grenades in the hope that they will maximise damage. But he does not think that his incessant swearing is “a sign of intelligence…but it just gets to the point quicker”.
You know why I'm cursing…it's getting your attention. You realize there is a fucking problem.
You think if I would have said in three sentences how @Twitter suppressed @BNNBreaking and we would like to seek your help for the 158th time…
this would have gone better?
Fuck no
— Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) October 2, 2022
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Serial entrepreneur
There was a time when Chahal was hailed as a marketing genius. By the year 2000, when he was 18 years old, he claimed to have become a millionaire. Even as a teenager, while his peers were only beginning to grasp the power of the internet, young Chahal understood he could tap into its potential.
He instinctively knew the internet was not just some way for people to communicate, or a way to protect free speech, but that it was a giant net catching all the people in the world. A tool to monitor their behaviour patterns to advertise to them.
As a teenager, he spent six months analysing the dot-com market by paying close attention to how companies in the industry grow rich and grow fast. “The Web was fast becoming the next big sales tool,” Chahal wrote in his 2008 book, The Dream: How I Learned the Risks and Rewards of Entrepreneurship and Made Millions.
One company called DoubleClick was especially of his interest because it was among the first to put ads on the internet. Chahal wanted to be part of the game. At 15, he was already buying printers and re-selling them for a higher price on eBay, accumulating enough capital for his business. The next year, he dropped out of school to work full time on his own dot com company ClickAgents, a performance-based advertising network.
“After barely six months in business, I was posting revenues of $300,000 per month,” he writes in his book. Two years later, Chahal said he sold his startup for $40 million to a company named ValueClick. Then in 2004, he founded an online advertising network, BlueLithium, which showed ads based on behavioural targeting of users. He sold it to Yahoo! for $300 million in 2007.
He featured in a 2008 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show as a young, single, tech mogul who beat the odds as a bullied child to become a triumphant entrepreneur. He posed in his 37th floor penthouse in San Francisco, showing off an over-the-top bed headboard adorned with gilt and a gold ‘G’ in the middle.
Chahal went on to set up six businesses between 2009 and 2020. The businesses ranged from advertising and marketing tech companies like gWallet to companies like ProcureNet, which was launched in 2020 during the pandemic, to rapidly manufacture large quantities of pharmaceutical materials such as N95 masks, pregnancy test kits and ventilators.
From Punjab to Silicon Valley
Chahal’s successful journey from a small town, Tarn Taran Sahib in Punjab to Silicon Valley in the US had served as an inspiration to many Indians. In the ’80s, Chahal’s parents emigrated to the US and settled down in San Jose. They only had $25 with them after leaving the rest of the savings with Chahal’s grandmother to take care of him and his siblings.
In June 1986, Chahal, his three siblings and his grandmother all moved to the US. When the children started going to school, they were bullied.
“Two or three times a week, I’d come home with my turban in my hand, and my hair, uncut since birth, spilling onto my shoulders. My father told me to ignore the other kids, assuring me that it would stop, but he was wrong. The kids in my class were relentless,” he wrote in his book. But San Jose gave him early access to the internet revolution that was taking the world by storm. Now, Chahal wants to get into the news business but Twitter is not playing ball.
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Fall from grace
Even before the Twitter storm around Chahal, he had already fallen from grace. It was swift and brutal. In 2013, at the height of his fame, he was arrested for hitting and kicking his girlfriend 117 times in 30 minutes.
He pled guilty to two misdemeanour counts of assault, under a plea deal after the video footage of the assault was considered inadmissible because it had been collected without a warrant. He was sentenced to three-year probation and community service. He was also removed from his position as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of RadiumOne, a digital marketing firm.
The skeletons kept tumbling out of his closet. In September 2014, another woman accused Chahal of assaulting her. He violated his three-year probation and was hit by a lawsuit by Yousef Khraibut, a 20-year-old former employee of one his startups, Gravity4. In 2016, Chahal stepped down as CEO of the company.
Khraibut alleged wrongful termination, harassment, defamation, and a host of other complaints which further tarnished Chahal’s battered image.
“After his firing, Chahal launched a social media campaign, vowing to get even with RadiumOne, challenging his firing, accusing police of brutality in his arrest, accusing his former girlfriend of being a prostitute as his justification for the conduct that led to his conviction,” Khraibut said in his complaint. He also accused Chahal of using surveillance technology to monitor Gravity4 employees.
Khraibut’s allegations against his former boss veered from professional to personal. He claimed Chahal was a “volume consumer of prescription medications, ranging from mood altering drugs to painkillers and attention deficit drugs” and that he was “both obsessed with and paranoid about his medications.” He alleged that the entrepreneur ridiculed Indian supporters who sent him fan mail or flocked to his defense after his first domestic violence arrest as groupies.
But the entrepreneur has moved on. While waging a Twitter war, he is also in the thick of wedding preparations. He is soon to be married on 26 October to actress Rubina Bajwa. “When you came into my life, I was pretty broken. And it takes a special woman to really pick up every piece,” he said when he proposed to Bajwa last year.
ThePrint reached out to Gurbaksh Chahal for a comment. This story will be updated when he responds.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)