[2] Ayyadurai holds four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in biological engineering, and is a Fulbright grant recipient.

[27] Plant scientist Kevin Folta noted that there was "no evidence ever published ... that shows a difference in formaldehyde between GM and non-GM varieties".

[28] 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.

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

He 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.

[35] 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.

[36] However, the Act was reportedly passed to avoid a government shutdown,[37] and Warren petitioned the Food and Drug Administration for "regulations to ensure that the labeling of GMO products is fair, standardized and transparent".

[38] In August 2017, Ayyadurai spoke at the Boston Free Speech rally, a gathering whose speaker line-up included right-wing extremists, and which drew large counter-protests.

[39][40] 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".

[41][42] In April 2018, the city of Cambridge threatened Ayyadurai with daily fines for an alleged zoning code violation if he did not remove a banner on his campaign bus.

Colligan requested that Ayyadurai bless a small statue of Kek, the green frog that came to prominence as a symbol of the alt-right during the 2016 United States presidential election.

Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos disputed Ayyadurai's allegation of fraud and a spokesperson for the state accused him of spreading misinformation.

[73] 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.

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

[77] In April 2020, Politico and Vanity Fair reported that QAnon supporter DeAnna Lorraine recommended that Ayyadurai be included in COVID-19 discussions at Donald Trump's White House.

[14] Ayyadurai started a campaign in 2011 in which he rebranded himself as the "Inventor of Email"; according to a paper published in Information & Culture, he "provoked a dramatic succession of exaggerated claims, credulous reporters, retractions, and accusations that a cabal of industry insiders and corrupt Wikipedia editors are colluding to hide the truth.

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

He 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.

"[88]: 27  Haigh wrote that Ayyadurai had created "infographic" outlines for his view of history and published the assembled documents under various domain names that he had registered to support his claim.

[90] 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.

[4][90] Responding to his critics on his personal website,[86][90] Ayyadurai described EMAIL as "the first of its kind—a fully integrated, database-driven, electronic translation of the interoffice paper mail system derived from the ordinary office situation."

"[91] Ayyadurai presented a press release on his webpage asserting that his undergraduate professor Noam Chomsky, of MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, also supported his claims.

After Tomlinson's death, Ayyadurai told The Hindu that he believed that news outlets retracted their stories about him because, "Raytheon advertises in publications like the Huffington Post and CNN" and that if he were "a white guy and had a copyright for email, I would have my photo on every stamp in the world.

The filing also named writer Sam Biddle, executive editor John Cook, and Gawker founder and CEO Nick Denton.

Gawker Media responded that, "These claims to have invented email have been repeatedly debunked by the Smithsonian Institute [sic], Gizmodo, the Washington Post and others.

"[94][95] In November 2016, the by-then-bankrupt Gawker Media settled the lawsuit with Ayyadurai for $750,000 as part of a broader settlement with wrestler Hulk Hogan and journalist Ashley Terrill, all of whom were represented by attorney Charles Harder.

[98][99] Denton wrote that "we expected to prevail" in the Ayyadurai and Terrill lawsuits, "but all-out legal war with" billionaire Peter Thiel, who financially backed Harder, was untenable in terms of cost, time and human toll.

[100] Katie Hafner, the author of several books on Internet history—including one on the development of ARPANET email—said, "This situation is both bizarre and appalling in that here we are simply trying to get the record straight, and [Ayyadurai has] managed to make money off claims that appear to be misleading.

"[101] In January 2017, 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.

[106][107][108][109] In September 2017, United States District Judge F. Dennis Saylor dismissed the defamation claims against Techdirt, but declined to strike the complaint under the anti-SLAPP law.