Satya Nadella is the CEO of the World's Most Valuable company and was named Fortune's Businessman of the year.

In 2013, then current CEO Steve Ballmer announced his departure and to many people's surprise, Microsoft chose Satya Nadella as his replacement. Many questioned the choice as Nadella was not a founder like Bill Gates or even a big personality like other CEOs in the spotlight. But, the new CEO went on to lead some of Microsoft's biggest acquisitions.

In 2016 Microsoft acquired Linkedin for $26.2 billion dollars and in 2018, the company acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion dollars. In time, Nadella turned Microsoft into a mobile and cloud company. With this, Nadella transitioned Microsoft into a company of the future.

Nadella's work was validated when on April 25th of this year, Microsoft hit the $1 trillion value mark, up 230 percent since his start at the helm of the company. Another high point for the tech giant, Microsoft earned $39 Billion in revenue for the fiscal year of 2019. That means Microsoft is growing its profit at a three year compound annual rate of 11 percent. The company won the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract with the Pentagon in October, and more recently in November, Microsoft had another win, announcing that its workplace messaging app has 20 million daily active users, surpassing rival, Slack.

And to what does Nadella credit the success of the company? His reliance on others. "I'm wired to be fairly confident in myself and to let others shine," the CEO told Fortune.

Can Satya Nadella roll his momentum into 2020? In a crowd of noisy business leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, it looks like the former underdog, Satya Nadella could be most likely to succeed.

Share:
More In Business
Tony Awards draw best audience in 6 years for CBS
The Tony Awards on Sunday lured 4.85 million viewers to CBS, its largest broadcast audience in six years. CBS says Monday that Nielsen data shows the telecast — hosted by “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo — scored a 38% increase over last year’s 3.53 million viewers. That’s the largest audience for the Tonys since 2019, when the telecast that year nabbed 5.4 million viewers and “Hadestown” was crowned best new musical. The latest version also had to compete with the second game of the NBA Finals, between the Thunder and Pacers,
Apple unveils software redesign while reeling from AI missteps
After stumbling out of the starting gate in Big Tech’s pivotal race to capitalize on artificial intelligence, Apple tried to regain its footing Monday during a developers conference that focused mostly on incremental advances and cosmetic changes in its technology.
DA: Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO killing said he ‘had it coming’
Six weeks before UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down outside a Manhattan hotel last December, Luigi Mangione mused about rebelling against “the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel” and expressed that killing the executive “conveys a greedy bastard that had it coming."
Load More