Satya Nadella

Satya loved cricket as a boy in Hyderabad and once said he learned more from cricket than from anything else — about teamwork, leadership and losing gracefully. He studied engineering, then moved to the United States, and joined a big software company called Microsoft in 1992.

Twenty-two years later he became its CEO — only the third person ever to lead Microsoft — and turned the company from selling packaged software to running one of the world's biggest cloud and AI platforms.

Satya Narayana Nadella (born 1967 in Hyderabad) studied electrical engineering at the Manipal Institute of Technology and earned an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School. He joined Microsoft in 1992 and led work on Bing, then the Server & Tools business, and finally the Cloud & Enterprise group where he built Azure into a serious rival to Amazon Web Services.

He became Microsoft's third CEO on 4 February 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer. Under him Microsoft embraced open source and cross-platform work, acquired LinkedIn (2016), GitHub (2018) and Activision Blizzard (2023), and made a landmark partnership with OpenAI that put GPT-4 at the heart of Bing and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

He was named chairman of Microsoft in 2021 and received the Padma Bhushan in 2022. His book Hit Refresh describes his 'growth mindset' approach to reinventing the company.