TOP 100 | LEADERS

Title: Chief Executive Officer Company: Microsoft Industry: Technology / Software

The gentlest revolution in corporate history keeps paying out. Satya Nadella inherited a company famous for infighting and taught it curiosity, killing the phone wars, embracing open source and betting everything on the cloud before betting it again on AI while rivals were still reading the papers. Twelve years on, Microsoft is worth more than ten times what it was when he arrived, Copilot sits inside the software a billion people use for work and Azure hosts the frontier models reshaping every industry, OpenAI’ s and Anthropic’ s alike. The Hyderabad-born engineer still credits cricket with teaching him leadership, and his maxim about learnit-alls beating know-it-alls has become the default philosophy of modern management. Empires have been built on louder ideas. Few have compounded like his quieter one. businesschief. com 93