- By Ajeet Kumar
- Mon, 07 Apr 2025 01:03 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
Indian billionaire 'worst nightmare':An Indian billionaire tech founder, Prasanna Sankar, is hiding from the police in Chennai and recently used X to share his side of a messy personal story. Sankar, who helped start Rippling, a $13 billion company in San Francisco, claims his wife, Dhivya Sashidhar, "kidnapped" their child and cheated on him. He is worth about $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.
However, his wife, Sashidhar tells a very different story, supported by court papers, emails, photos, and interviews. According to a report by The San Francisco Standard, his wife says she was a successful woman who gave up her career for Sankar, who she claims forced her into "painful sex", pushed for an "open marriage", and even hired prostitutes. She also says he put spy cameras in their home, illegally recorded her (including in the bathroom), and moved her and their son around the world to avoid taxes on his fortune.
Sashidhar calls it "worst nightmare" of her life
Right now, Sashidhar is fighting to get her 9-year-old son back while dealing with death threats after Sankar shared her email and phone number in a viral X post on March 23. She calls it "the worst nightmare of my life."
As per the story shared on social media by the billionaire, Sashidhar and Sankar met in 2007 in India when they were in college. She was the top student at their university, and he was a "star" coder. He claimed himself number 1 in India in terms of coding. They started dating in 2009, even though he was in Silicon Valley and she was studying at Cambridge. Sankar raised money for a failed social media app, then moved to the Netherlands in 2013 to be with Sashidhar, who worked at Shell. They got married that year, though her dad and a friend had doubts about Sankar’s maturity.
When trouble started for Indian billionaire
In 2015, Sankar joined a startup called Zenefits in San Francisco, which later got in trouble for misleading investors. He and his boss, Parker Conrad, left and started Rippling in 2017, a company that helps businesses manage employees and money. People called Sankar a "coding god," and the company grew fast. But Sashidhar says life with him was tough. Their son was born in 2016, and she claims Sankar ignored them, focusing only on work.
She also says he pressured her for sex despite her pain from childbirth, threatening to cheat if she didn’t agree. In 2019 emails, Sankar admitted to contacting escorts but apologized. He also asked for an open marriage, which he later told The Standard was just a moment of frustration.
In 2020, Sankar left Rippling before it raised big money. For the next two years, he moved his family around globally, possibly to protect his wealth. He reportedly owns 9% of Rippling and became a billionaire by 2022, according to Forbes.