48 Facts About Shiva Ayyadurai

Shiva Ayyadurai has become known for promoting conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and unfounded medical claims.

Shiva Ayyadurai sued Gawker Media and Techdirt for defamation for disputing his account of inventing email; both lawsuits were settled out of court.

Shiva Ayyadurai attracted attention for two reports: the first questioning the working conditions of India's largest scientific agency; the second questioning the safety of genetically modified food, such as soybeans.

In 2024, Shiva Ayyadurai launched a campaign for president of the United States.

Shiva Ayyadurai was born Vellayappa Ayyadurai Shiva in 1963, in Bombay, India.

Shiva Ayyadurai grew up in the Muhavur village in Rajapalayam, Tamil Nadu.

In 1978, as a 14-year-old high school student, Shiva Ayyadurai attended a summer program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University to study computer programming.

In 1994, Shiva Ayyadurai founded a company called Millennium Cybernetics, which produces email management software originally called Xiva and now called EchoMail.

In 2009, Ayyadurai was hired by India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India's largest science agency, by its director general, Samir K Brahmachari.

Shiva Ayyadurai reported that he had spent months trying to create a business plan for CSIR Tech, but received no response from Brahmachari.

Shiva Ayyadurai then distributed a draft plan, which was not authorized by CSIR, to the agency's scientists that requested feedback and criticized management.

Shiva Ayyadurai's job offer was withdrawn five months after the position was offered.

Mr Shiva Ayyadurai circulated his paper not just to the agency's scientists but to journalists, and wrote about his situation to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Shiva Ayyadurai said that CSIR scientists reported that "they work in a medieval, feudal environment" that required a "major overhaul".

Pushpa Bhargava, founding director of the CSIR's Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, endorsed the letter, calling Shiva Ayyadurai's sacking the worst of many cases he had seen of "vindictiveness in the CSIR" and accused CSIR administration of being "impervious to healthy and fair criticism".

In 2015, Shiva Ayyadurai published a paper that applied systems biology, which uses mathematical modeling, to predict the chemical composition of genetically modified soybeans, and whether or not they were substantially equivalent to unmodified soybeans.

Shortly after publication, Shiva Ayyadurai embarked on a speaking tour of the US At the National Press Club, he said that genetic modification had "fundamentally modified the metabolic system of the soy", disrupting the "beautiful way of detoxifying [formaldehyde]" present in non-GM soy.

Shiva Ayyadurai later cited the study as evidence of a lack of safety standards for GM foods and bet Monsanto a $10 million building if they could prove that they were safe.

In 2016, Shiva Ayyadurai promised to donate $10 million to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign if she could disprove his research.

On March 17,2017, Shiva Ayyadurai filed as a Republican candidate in the 2018 United States Senate election in Massachusetts, running against incumbent Elizabeth Warren.

Shiva Ayyadurai said he would take a science and engineering perspective on problem solving, focusing on immigration, education and innovation.

Shiva Ayyadurai called for secure borders and an end to sanctuary cities, support for more choices in public education, and for more scrutiny of "pay-to-play" science research.

Shiva Ayyadurai has accused Warren of voting in favor of the Farmer Assurance Provision and against a GM labeling bill sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Shiva Ayyadurai later disputed how the event was characterized, tweeting that the "establishment" wanted to block attendance and media coverage and sought a "Race War to divide us".

The city reversed its position the following month and Shiva Ayyadurai, in turn, dropped a lawsuit alleging that his free speech rights had been violated.

Shiva Ayyadurai obliged and described Colligan as "one of our greatest supporters".

Shiva Ayyadurai sold pins promoting his campaign that featured a brown-skinned variant of the "Groyper", the namesake and mascot for white nationalist group Groypers which Colligan is affiliated with.

Shiva Ayyadurai ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in the 2020 US Senate election in Massachusetts.

Shiva Ayyadurai alleged that ballot images had to be preserved for 22 months and were now missing.

Shiva Ayyadurai has continued to spread misinformation since about the 2020 presidential election.

Shiva Ayyadurai announced a run for the 2022 Massachusetts gubernatorial election in December 2021, but never filed for the primary.

Shiva Ayyadurai intended to run in the 2024 United States presidential election as an independent.

Shiva Ayyadurai, who is not a natural-born citizen of the United States, is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president and was excluded from ballots.

Shiva Ayyadurai simultaneously intended to run to be a US Senator from Massachusetts but was not on the ballot.

Shiva Ayyadurai defined COVID-19 as "an overactive dysfunctional immune system that overreacts and that's what causes damage to the body", and claimed that vitamin C could be used to treat it.

Shiva Ayyadurai alleged that COVID-19 was spread by the "deep state" and accused Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of being a "Deep State Plant".

Shiva Ayyadurai called for Fauci to be fired and his supporters lobbied for Fauci to be replaced by Shiva Ayyadurai.

In March 2020, Shiva Ayyadurai published an open letter to then-US President Donald Trump, writing that a national lockdown was unnecessary and advocated that large doses of vitamins could prevent and cure COVID-19.

Shiva Ayyadurai is notable for his widely disputed claim of being the "inventor of email".

Shiva Ayyadurai's claim is based on an electronic mail software called EMAIL, an implementation of interoffice email system, which he wrote as a 14-year-old student at Livingston High School, New Jersey in 1979.

In that interview, Shiva Ayyadurai recalled that Les Michelson, the former particle scientist at Brookhaven National Labs who assigned Shiva Ayyadurai the project, had the idea of creating an electronic mail system that uses the header conventions of a hardcopy memorandum.

In February 2012, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History announced that Shiva Ayyadurai had donated "a trove of documents and code" related to EMAIL.

Shiva Ayyadurai based these elements directly off of the interoffice mail memos the doctors had been using for years, in hopes of convincing people to actually use the newfangled technology.

Shiva Ayyadurai's claims drew editorial clarifications and corrections, as well as criticism from industry observers.

Shiva Ayyadurai characterized the earlier work of Tomlinson, Tom Van Vleck and others as text messaging, rather than an electronic version of an interoffice mail system.

In May 2016, Shiva Ayyadurai filed suit against Gawker Media for $35 million, alleging that their website Gawker published "false and defamatory statements", causing "substantial damage to Dr Shiva Ayyadurai's personal and professional reputation and career".

In January 2017, Shiva Ayyadurai, again represented by Harder, filed a $15 million libel lawsuit on similar grounds against Techdirt founder Mike Masnick and two other parties for a series of articles published beginning in September 2014.

Shiva Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and her family".