Satya Nadella

Back in 1993, the man who would eventually become Microsoft’s CEO was working as a marketing manager at the company. A video from that year shows Satya Nadella, wearing a pair of ’70s-style spectacles and full head of hair, explaining the merits of a powerful nascent technology: Microsoft Excel.

More than three decades later, after climbing to the pinnacle of the tech giant, Nadella is working to create something far bigger: artificial general intelligence (AGI). It was he who, in 2019, presided over Microsoft’s decision to invest its first billion into an obscure AI lab called OpenAI and, in the years that followed, grew that partnership into a profit-sharing deal worth more than $13 billion. OpenAI needed Microsoft’s help in its effort to build AGI because of the tech giant’s prowess in cloud computing, the arm of the company that Nadella grew into a global leader before he became CEO, and which is essential for the creation of modern AI. 

Nadella has also proven himself to be a shrewd corporate maneuverer. When OpenAI’s board briefly fired Sam Altman in late 2023, Nadella offered all OpenAI employees jobs at his own company, essentially neutralizing the board’s threat and clearing the way for Altman’s return. Since that high drama last November, Nadella has moved to reduce Microsoft’s reliance on OpenAI, investing $16 million into the rival French AI lab Mistral, and separately hiring a team of world-leading researchers to begin a parallel effort, inside Microsoft, to build its own large language models.

*Disclosure: OpenAI and TIME have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access TIME's archives.