Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella became chief executive of Microsoft in 2014 and turned a company written off as a legacy business into the most valuable in the world. Born in Hyderabad in 1967, the son of a senior Indian civil servant and a Sanskrit lecturer, he studied electrical engineering in Manipal, took a master's in computer science in Wisconsin and an MBA at Chicago, and joined Microsoft in 1992. He spent twenty-two years there before becoming chief executive, most consequentially running the server and tools division and then the cloud business, where he had taken Azure from a struggling side project to a credible competitor to Amazon. He inherited a company that had missed mobile entirely, had just bought Nokia's handset business for over seven billion dollars, and whose culture of internal competition was widely blamed for it. He wrote off the phone business within eighteen months, ended the stack-ranking performance system, and reoriented everything around the cloud and subscriptions. Office became Office 365. Windows stopped being the centre of the company. He also reversed thirty years of hostility to open source — Microsoft had called Linux a cancer — put Linux on Azure, and bought GitHub in 2018. He acquired LinkedIn in 2016 and Activision Blizzard in 2023 for $69 billion. The decisive bet was the investment in OpenAI, beginning with one billion dollars in 2019 and rising to around thirteen, which gave Microsoft first access to the models it built into its products. Market capitalisation rose roughly tenfold under him. He also took the chairmanship in 2021, consolidating a role his predecessors had kept separate.
- Lived: 1967 CE – ?
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: executive, businessman
