Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella grew up in Hyderabad, took an electrical engineering degree in India, a master's in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and later an MBA at the University of Chicago. After working at Sun Microsystems he joined Microsoft in 1992, ran research and development for its online services and then its Cloud and Enterprise Group, which built Azure into the company's main business. He became chief executive in February 2014 and chairman in June 2021.

In 2019 he approved a 1 billion dollar investment in OpenAI after Kevin Scott and finance chief Amy Hood told the board Microsoft was "scrambling to replicate" Google's AI results. Testifying in Elon Musk's suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in May 2026, Nadella called the deal a "one-way door" and said, "We were outsourcing essentially a lot of the core IP development and taking a massive dependency on OpenAI." An April 2022 email shown at trial said he did not want Microsoft to become IBM while OpenAI became the next Microsoft. When OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman in November 2023, Nadella announced that Altman and Greg Brockman would join Microsoft to lead a new AI research team; Altman returned to OpenAI days later.

From 2024 Nadella hedged the OpenAI dependency. In March 2024 he hired Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan from Inflection to form Microsoft AI, and the October 2025 agreement let Microsoft pursue AGI on its own. In March 2026 he moved Copilot to Jacob Andreou so Suleyman could concentrate on models, writing that progress at the model layer "is more critical than ever to our success as a company over the next decade." At Davos in January 2026 he proposed a test for an AI bubble: "A telltale sign of if it's a bubble would be if all we are talking about are the tech firms." After Dario Amodei called in September 2026 for labs to slow capability gains together, Nadella wrote that Microsoft welcomed "deliberate pacing" and would open its model code of conduct to public comment.