The chief executive who made Microsoft a trillion-dollar company by stopping it from being the company it had been. When Satya Nadella took over in February 2014 the firm was a fading desktop-monopoly story. A decade later it sits at the centre of the cloud-and-AI economy. The pivot has been studied to within an inch of its life by every business school in the world; the man at its centre remains low-key, observably kind in a way the technology industry does not reward, and — in his memoir Hit Refresh — surprisingly forthcoming about a difficult parental experience that reshaped his managerial philosophy. Born in Hyderabad, schooled at Hyderabad Public School and Manipal, postgraduate at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, MBA at Chicago Booth. Carries his Carnatic-music training and his cricket lineage into a corner office on Microsoft's Redmond campus without the slightest theatre.