Satya Nadella

About Me

Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and rose to CEO in 2014, when his billionaire predecessor, Steve Ballmer, retired that year. Nadella was named chairman in 2021, replacing veteran tech exec and investor John Thompson, who had assumed the role from Microsoft's billionaire cofounder Bill Gates in 2014. As CEO, Nadella has built Microsoft Azure into a leading cloud computing platform and overseen the acquisitions of LinkedIn for $26 billion in 2016 and Activision Blizzard for $69 billion 2023. He has also made Microsoft a major player in the AI boom, investing billions in OpenAI since 2019 and leading the development of Microsoft's own suite of AI-powered tools called CoPilot. He owns just 0.01% of the company's stock, but that's enough to make him a billionaire, when combined with his more than $700 million of share sales. A native of India, Nadella came to the U.S. as a student, earning a master's in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MBA from the University of Chicago.