Satya Narayana Nadella (born August 19, 1967) is an Indian-American business executive who serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. He became the third CEO in the company's history on February 4, 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer and following founder Bill Gates,[2] and added the role of chairman on June 16, 2021.[1]

Nadella spent more than two decades inside Microsoft before reaching the corner office, with leadership stints in the company's online services, server, and cloud businesses. As the executive who built the Azure cloud platform into a viable rival to Amazon Web Services, he was widely seen as the candidate most likely to refocus Microsoft on emerging platforms when the board chose him over external candidates including Ford CEO Alan Mulally and Nokia's Stephen Elop.

In the AI era, Nadella is best known for engineering Microsoft's deep partnership with OpenAI, the largest commercial backing of any frontier AI laboratory. Microsoft committed roughly $13 billion to OpenAI across investments that began in July 2019,[6] and after OpenAI's October 2025 restructuring that stake converted into an equity holding of approximately 27 percent, valued at about $135 billion, accompanied by an OpenAI commitment to purchase $250 billion of Azure services.[25] That partnership produced the Microsoft Copilot family of generative AI products that Nadella has made the company's standard interface for AI. He has also driven roughly $80 billion of fiscal 2025 capital spending on AI data centers,[13] launched Microsoft's first in-house MAI models in 2025, and recruited Mustafa Suleyman to lead a new Microsoft AI division. Under his leadership Microsoft's stock has climbed roughly tenfold and the company crossed the $4 trillion market capitalization mark,[19] briefly making it the most valuable public company in the world. His tenure has also been defined by a cultural reset that abandoned the company's reputation for internal warfare in favour of what he calls a "growth mindset," and by major acquisitions including LinkedIn, GitHub, Nuance Communications, and Activision Blizzard.

Infobox

Field	Detail
Born	August 19, 1967, Hyderabad, India
Nationality	American (born Indian)
Education	Manipal Institute of Technology (BE, Electrical Engineering, 1988); University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (MS, Computer Science, 1990); University of Chicago Booth School of Business (MBA, 1997)
Title	Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft
CEO since	February 4, 2014
Chairman since	June 16, 2021
Predecessor as CEO	Steve Ballmer
Predecessor as Chair	John W. Thompson
Spouse	Anupama "Anu" Priyadarshini Venugopal (m. 1992)
Children	3 (Zain, deceased 2022; two daughters)
Residence	Clyde Hill, Washington
FY2025 total compensation	$96.5 million [15]
Net worth	Approximately $1.1 billion (2025, Forbes) [20]
Notable awards	Padma Bhushan (2022); Financial Times Person of the Year (2019); Fortune Businessperson of the Year (2019)
Author of	Hit Refresh (2017)

Early life and education

Nadella was born on August 19, 1967, in Hyderabad, in what is now the Indian state of Telangana, into a Telugu-speaking Hindu family. His father, Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandhar, was a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service from the 1962 batch and later served as a member of the Planning Commission of India. His mother, Prabhavati, was a Sanskrit lecturer.[1] The family moved frequently because of his father's postings, and Nadella has spoken in interviews about the influence of his father's intellectual seriousness and his mother's emphasis on humanities and arts.

Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School in Begumpet,[1] an institution whose alumni also include Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Mastercard chief executive Ajay Banga. He played cricket on the school team, an interest that has remained part of his public persona, and has often credited the sport with teaching him lessons about leadership, teamwork, and competing under pressure.

He earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in Karnataka in 1988.[1] After failing to secure admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology, he moved to the United States to pursue graduate study, completing a Master of Science in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1990.[1] While at UW-Milwaukee he worked as a graduate teaching assistant and participated in the College of Engineering and Applied Science Upward Bound program, which provided college-preparatory tutoring to inner-city high school students.

Later in his career, while already employed at Microsoft, Nadella enrolled in the executive MBA program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. For more than two years he flew from Seattle to Chicago every other Friday evening to attend Saturday classes, then back to Redmond on Sunday, completing the degree in 1997.[1]

Career at Sun Microsystems

After completing his master's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1990, Nadella joined Sun Microsystems as a member of its technology staff. Sun was then one of the dominant forces in workstation computing and was building Solaris, an operating system that competed with what Microsoft would soon ship as Windows NT. Nadella's tenure at Sun was brief: he was recruited to Microsoft in 1992 to work on the Windows NT effort,[1] the operating system that would eventually become the foundation for Microsoft's enterprise business.

Microsoft career, 1992 to 2014

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 as a program manager and engineer in the Windows NT team in Redmond, Washington.[1] His early projects included Windows NT itself and the company's short-lived interactive television initiative. Over the next two decades he held a sequence of engineering and general management roles spanning consumer services, business applications, online advertising, search, and enterprise infrastructure.

In 2007 Nadella was named senior vice president of research and development for the Online Services Division,[1] the unit that ran the Bing search engine, the MSN portal, and Microsoft's nascent advertising platform. He took the role at a moment when Google had decisively pulled ahead in search and Microsoft was investing heavily to remain competitive. Bing did not displace Google, but the work taught Nadella much about running large data center workloads and competing in a services business with very different economics from packaged software.

In 2011 Nadella was promoted to president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business,[1] succeeding Bob Muglia. The Server and Tools group sold Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, and the Azure cloud platform, and at the time of his appointment generated roughly $17 billion a year. Under his leadership the division reorganized around cloud-first development. Azure, which had launched in 2010 as Windows Azure under Ray Ozzie, was repositioned as a general-purpose public cloud capable of running Linux, open source databases, and customer-built workloads, not only Windows. Annual revenue for the cloud and enterprise group grew to about $20.3 billion by mid-2013,[1] and Azure became the foundation on which Microsoft would later layer its AI services.

When Steve Ballmer announced his retirement in August 2013, Nadella was on a shortlist of internal candidates that included former Skype CEO Tony Bates and Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop.[21] The board, led by independent director John W. Thompson during the search, considered external candidates including Ford CEO Alan Mulally before settling on Nadella in early 2014.[21]

How did Satya Nadella become CEO of Microsoft?

Nadella was appointed CEO of Microsoft on February 4, 2014, becoming the third person to hold the role after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.[2] As part of the same announcement, Bill Gates stepped down as chairman to become a technology adviser to Nadella, and John W. Thompson took on the chairman role.[2] Nadella inherited a company widely viewed as having missed the smartphone era, weighed down by the recently completed acquisition of Nokia's handset business, and trailing badly in cloud computing.

Cultural transformation and growth mindset

From the outset Nadella made organizational culture a central theme of his leadership. He drew explicitly on the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research distinguishes a fixed mindset, where ability is treated as innate and unchangeable, from a growth mindset, where ability is seen as something that develops with effort and feedback. Nadella circulated Dweck's work to senior leaders and asked the company to move from a culture of know-it-alls to one of learn-it-alls.

This shift was paired with structural changes that broke down longstanding silos between product groups, ended the much-maligned stack-ranking employee review system that had been retired late in the Ballmer era, and tied executive compensation more closely to cross-divisional collaboration. Nadella has framed the cultural reset as the precondition for everything else the company has accomplished since 2014, including its embrace of open source software, its willingness to ship its applications on iOS and Android, and its ability to integrate large acquisitions without destroying them.

Major acquisitions during Nadella's tenure

Nadella pursued one of the most aggressive acquisition strategies of any chief executive in Microsoft's history, completing four deals worth more than $7 billion each.

Acquisition	Sector	Value	Announced	Closed
Mojang (Minecraft)	Gaming	$2.5 billion	September 2014	November 2014 [1]
LinkedIn	Professional networking	$26.2 billion	June 13, 2016 [3]	December 8, 2016 [4]
GitHub	Developer tools	$7.5 billion	June 4, 2018 [5]	October 26, 2018
Nuance Communications	Speech AI	$19.7 billion	April 12, 2021 [7]	March 4, 2022 [8]
Activision Blizzard	Gaming	$68.7 billion [10]	January 18, 2022	October 13, 2023

The Mojang transaction had been negotiated under Steve Ballmer and closed in the first months of Nadella's tenure, bringing Minecraft, one of the best-selling video games in history, into Microsoft's Xbox unit. The LinkedIn deal, announced four months after Microsoft's purchase of mobile development platform Xamarin, was at the time the largest in Microsoft's history. Jeff Weiner remained as LinkedIn's chief executive and reported directly to Nadella,[3] an early example of an integration model that left acquired businesses with substantial autonomy.

The purchase of GitHub, the world's most popular code-hosting service, was announced in June 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock[5] and closed that October. It was a vivid demonstration of how far Microsoft had moved on open source, given that Ballmer had famously called Linux "a cancer" in 2001. Under Nadella, Microsoft became a top corporate contributor to open source projects on GitHub itself.

Nuance Communications, the speech recognition specialist whose technology powered the original Apple Siri, was acquired in 2022 to anchor Microsoft's healthcare cloud strategy.[7] The transaction closed on March 4, 2022[8] after clearance from regulators in the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.

Activision Blizzard, by far the largest deal of Nadella's tenure and the largest in Microsoft's history, was announced in January 2022 at $68.7 billion in cash.[10] It triggered a 21-month antitrust battle with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the European Commission, and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority. The deal closed on October 13, 2023 after Microsoft transferred Activision's cloud-streaming rights for PC and console games to French publisher Ubisoft for 15 years to address concerns about cloud gaming concentration.[10]

Becoming chairman

On June 16, 2021, Microsoft's board elected Nadella chairman in addition to his role as chief executive.[1] He succeeded John W. Thompson, the former Symantec chief who had led the search that selected Nadella in 2014 and had served as chairman ever since. Thompson remained on the board as lead independent director, while Nadella took on responsibility for shaping the agenda of the board itself.

What is Satya Nadella's AI strategy and the OpenAI partnership?

The defining strategic move of Nadella's tenure has been Microsoft's deep partnership with OpenAI, the San Francisco research laboratory co-founded by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Musk. The partnership has gone through several phases, each tied to a substantially larger financial commitment and a tighter operational coupling between OpenAI's models and Microsoft Azure.

When did Microsoft first invest in OpenAI?

Microsoft and OpenAI announced their initial partnership on July 22, 2019.[6] Microsoft committed $1 billion in a multiyear arrangement structured partly as cash and partly as Azure compute credits. The agreement made Microsoft OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider and named Microsoft as the preferred partner for the commercialization of any pre-AGI technologies that OpenAI developed.[6] The deal was negotiated by Nadella with Sam Altman, then OpenAI's president and soon to be its chief executive, and by Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott, who became the executive most responsible for the technical relationship.

Expanded investment, January 2023

In the months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the partnership entered what Microsoft described as its third phase. On January 23, 2023, the company announced what it called a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment,[9] widely reported at $10 billion.[22] Across all phases Microsoft's disclosed funding commitment to OpenAI totaled $13.8 billion, of which $11.8 billion had been funded as of March 31, 2026.[41] The funding was structured to flow primarily through Azure cloud credits, with OpenAI committing to use Microsoft as its exclusive cloud provider and Microsoft entitled to a share of OpenAI's profits up to a defined cap before its equity converted to a 49 percent profit interest. The deal made Microsoft the largest commercial backer of any frontier AI laboratory and embedded OpenAI's models into the Azure OpenAI Service for enterprise customers.[9]

November 2023 OpenAI board crisis

On the evening of November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board abruptly fired Sam Altman as chief executive, citing a loss of confidence in his candor with directors.[12] President Greg Brockman was removed from the board, then resigned. Microsoft, which had committed approximately $13 billion to OpenAI by that point, learned of the firing about a minute before the public announcement.

Over the next four days Nadella played a central role in resolving the crisis. He spoke repeatedly with Altman, with Brockman, and with the OpenAI board, and on November 19 announced via post on X that Microsoft would hire Altman and Brockman to lead a new advanced AI research group inside the company, with the offer extended to any OpenAI employees who wished to join them.[12] Within hours, more than 700 of OpenAI's roughly 770 employees signed a letter threatening to follow Altman to Microsoft unless the board resigned and reinstated him.[12] On November 21 OpenAI announced that Altman would return as chief executive and that the board would be reconstituted with new directors including former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, and Quora chief executive Adam D'Angelo.[12] Altman was formally reinstated on November 22.

The episode was widely interpreted as a demonstration of how much leverage Microsoft had accumulated over OpenAI through compute and capital, and as a personal vindication of Nadella's quiet, deliberative style of crisis management.

Mustafa Suleyman and Microsoft AI, 2024

On March 19, 2024, Microsoft announced that Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of Google DeepMind and chief executive of Inflection AI, would join Microsoft as executive vice president and chief executive of a new division called Microsoft AI.[11] Inflection co-founder Karen Simonyan joined as chief scientist,[11] and the bulk of Inflection's technical staff moved with them. Microsoft paid Inflection approximately $650 million in a licensing arrangement that allowed Inflection to continue operating as an independent company under a new chief executive while transferring most of its talent and intellectual property to Microsoft.[23] The deal gave Microsoft a substantial in-house AI research and product organization separate from its OpenAI relationship and was structured to avoid triggering merger review.

Under Nadella, the new Microsoft AI division took responsibility for the company's consumer AI products, including the Copilot consumer chatbot, the Bing search engine, the Edge browser,[11] and the MSN portal.

How was the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership restructured in 2025 and 2026?

The terms binding OpenAI to Azure loosened in stages. On January 21, 2025, coinciding with OpenAI's announcement of the Stargate infrastructure project, Microsoft agreed to replace its exclusivity over new OpenAI compute capacity with a right of first refusal, while OpenAI made what the companies described as a new, large Azure commitment covering its products and model training.[24]

In October 2025 Microsoft and OpenAI announced a comprehensive restructuring of their commercial relationship coinciding with OpenAI's reorganization into a public benefit corporation. The new agreement converted Microsoft's profit-sharing interest into an equity stake of approximately 27 percent in the restructured OpenAI,[25] valued at the company's then-current $500 billion valuation. OpenAI was no longer required to use Microsoft as its exclusive cloud provider for all workloads, although Microsoft remained its primary cloud partner and no longer retained a right of first refusal on incremental compute commitments.[25] Microsoft's stake was valued at approximately $135 billion, OpenAI contracted to purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services, and any declaration of artificial general intelligence by OpenAI would now be verified by an independent expert panel.[25]

A further amendment was announced on April 27, 2026.[18] Under the revised terms Microsoft retained a license to OpenAI's intellectual property for models and products through 2032, but the license became non-exclusive.[18] The much-discussed AGI clause, which had given OpenAI's board the right to declare that artificial general intelligence had been achieved and thereby restrict Microsoft's commercial rights, was removed in favor of an independent third-party verification process.[25] OpenAI continued to pay Microsoft a revenue share through 2030 up to a capped total amount.[18] The amendment also ended Microsoft's own revenue-share payments to OpenAI, and OpenAI gained the ability to serve its products to customers on any cloud provider while continuing to ship them first on Azure.[18]

In-house models and the Anthropic partnership, 2025 and 2026

Alongside the OpenAI relationship, Nadella moved Microsoft toward a multi-model strategy during 2025. In January 2025 he created CoreAI Platform and Tools, an engineering division led by executive vice president Jay Parikh that combined the developer division, the AI platform organization, and parts of the office of the chief technology officer to build what Nadella described as "the end-to-end Copilot & AI stack" for first-party and third-party customers.[26] In August 2025 the Microsoft AI division released its first models trained end to end in house: MAI-Voice-1, a speech generation model able to produce a minute of audio in under a second on a single GPU, and MAI-1-preview, a mixture-of-experts foundation model pre-trained and post-trained on approximately 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.[27] In November 2025 Suleyman announced an MAI Superintelligence Team within the division, working with chief scientist Karen Simonyan, to pursue what he called "humanist superintelligence": advanced AI aimed at concrete problems such as medical diagnostics that, in his words, "remains grounded and controllable."[28]

Microsoft also opened its products and cloud to OpenAI's principal rival. In September 2025 it added Anthropic models to Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing the Researcher agent to run on Claude Opus 4.1 and letting Copilot Studio customers build agents on Claude Sonnet 4.[29] On November 18, 2025, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Anthropic announced strategic partnerships under which Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity, with the option to contract up to one gigawatt more, while Nvidia agreed to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, bringing Claude models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5, to Azure customers and making Claude the first model family available on all three major hyperscale clouds.[30]

What are Microsoft Copilot products?

The technical fruits of the OpenAI partnership have shipped under the Copilot brand, which Nadella has positioned as Microsoft's standard interface for generative AI across consumer, developer, and enterprise products.

Product	Launch	Description
GitHub Copilot preview	June 29, 2021	AI pair-programmer for code, originally based on OpenAI Codex
GitHub Copilot general availability	June 21, 2022	Paid subscription for individual developers
Bing Chat / new Bing	February 7, 2023	Conversational search built on a custom GPT-4 variant
Microsoft 365 Copilot announcement	March 16, 2023	AI assistant for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams
Bing Chat renamed Microsoft Copilot	November 15, 2023	Unification of consumer AI assistants under one brand
Microsoft 365 Copilot general availability	November 1, 2023	Initially $30 per user per month for enterprise customers
Copilot+ PCs	May 20, 2024	Windows PCs with on-device neural processing units

The GitHub Copilot service, launched in technical preview in mid-2021 and reaching general availability one year later, was Microsoft's first widely deployed generative AI product. Nadella has often pointed to Copilot's productivity gains for developers as the kind of practical AI value the company was aiming for. Microsoft 365 Copilot extended the same approach to information workers, embedding generative AI into the productivity applications used by hundreds of millions of subscribers.

The Copilot+ PC program, unveiled at a Microsoft event on May 20, 2024 and shipping that summer, defined a new category of Windows PCs with dedicated neural processing units capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second, designed to run AI models locally rather than only in the cloud.

Other initiatives

Nadella has framed AI infrastructure as one of the largest capital programs in Microsoft's history. The company committed approximately $80 billion in capital expenditure during fiscal year 2025 (the year ending June 30, 2025) to build AI-capable data centers, with more than half of that spending in the United States.[13] The expansion has driven Azure to remain firmly the second-largest public cloud platform globally, behind Amazon Web Services and ahead of Google Cloud.

In parallel with the AI build-out, Microsoft has continued to invest in long-horizon research. On February 19, 2025, Microsoft unveiled the Majorana 1, which it described as the world's first quantum processor based on a topological qubit architecture.[14] The chip integrated eight topological qubits on a single device built from indium arsenide and aluminum and was presented as the first step toward a million-qubit quantum computer.[14] Nadella personally championed the announcement, framing it as a generational bet on a new computing substrate alongside Microsoft's near-term AI work.

2025-2026 developments

In a February 2025 interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast, Nadella played down talk of imminent artificial general intelligence, saying that "us self-claiming some AGI milestone" would be "nonsensical benchmark hacking," and argued that the real test of AI is whether it lifts global economic growth toward 10 percent.[31]

Microsoft closed fiscal 2025 on June 30, 2025 with revenue of $281.7 billion, up 15 percent, as Azure surpassed $75 billion in annual revenue for the first time.[32] When the results were reported on July 30, 2025, the company's market capitalization topped $4 trillion, making Microsoft the second company after Nvidia to reach that level.[19] The expansion came with significant workforce reductions: Microsoft eliminated roughly 15,000 positions during 2025, including about 9,000 in July, and in a July 24, 2025 memo Nadella told employees that the decisions had been "weighing heavily" on him even as the company's capital spending reached historic highs.[33] In October 2025 Nadella named longtime sales chief Judson Althoff chief executive officer of Microsoft's commercial business, unifying sales, marketing, and operations under one leader so that Nadella could spend more of his own time on the company's technical agenda across AI infrastructure, systems architecture, and products.[34]

Spending continued to accelerate into fiscal 2026. For the quarter ended December 31, 2025, Microsoft reported revenue of $81.3 billion, up 17 percent, with Azure growth of 39 percent, quarterly capital expenditures of approximately $37.5 billion, and a commercial demand backlog that had doubled to $625 billion, boosted by OpenAI's $250 billion Azure commitment; the stock fell about 5 percent in extended trading as investors weighed the pace of AI investment.[35] Nadella defended the outlays, arguing that "you've got to think about compute as also R&D."[35]

At the Build developer conference in early June 2026, held in San Francisco for the first time since 2016, Nadella described the industry as moving from the cloud-native era to an "agent-native stack" in which AI agents reason continuously and generate and run code dynamically. The company introduced Project Solara, a purpose-built agentic platform that includes a desktop device and a wearable badge for interacting with agents, alongside its first reasoning model.[36] Reflecting on the financial logic of the OpenAI bet, Nadella has pointed to an internal projection that Microsoft expected to earn roughly $92 billion in returns on its $13 billion OpenAI investment.[42]

Public profile and awards

Nadella has received a number of significant honors during his tenure as chief executive.

Year	Honor
2014	Time 100 most influential people [1]
2014	CNN-News18 Indian of the Year
2015	Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's highest award for non-resident Indians [1]
2019	Financial Times Person of the Year [37]
2019	Fortune Businessperson of the Year [1]
2022	Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian honor [1]
2024	Time 100 most influential people
2024	Honorary doctorate, Georgia Institute of Technology [38]

The Padma Bhushan was conferred by the President of India in the trade and industry category for his contributions to technology and business leadership.[1] He is also the author of Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, published by HarperBusiness in September 2017.[1] Nadella donated proceeds from the book to Microsoft Philanthropies.

Personal life

In 1992 Nadella married Anupama Priyadarshini Venugopal, known as Anu, the daughter of his father's IAS batchmate.[1] The couple settled in the Seattle suburbs and have raised three children: a son, Zain, and two daughters. Zain was born prematurely on August 13, 1996 and lived with cerebral palsy and severe quadriplegia for his entire life. He died on February 28, 2022 at the age of 26 after spending much of his life under the care of clinicians at Seattle Children's Hospital.[16] The Nadellas endowed the Zain Nadella Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neurosciences at the Seattle Children's Center for Integrative Brain Research in his memory.

Nadella has spoken often about how raising Zain and supporting his daughters, one of whom also has learning differences, shaped his understanding of empathy and his approach to leadership. He has described it as the experience that taught him to listen, and has linked it to Microsoft's investments in accessibility tools such as Seeing AI, the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and Immersive Reader.

The Nadellas live in Clyde Hill, Washington. Outside Microsoft, Nadella is a co-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC of Major League Soccer, having joined a new ownership group along with quarterback Russell Wilson, his then-wife Ciara, the rapper Macklemore, and several other Seattle figures in August 2019.[17] He is also a co-owner of the Seattle Orcas, an MLC cricket franchise that began play in 2023 and reflects Nadella's long-standing love of cricket. He served on the board of Starbucks from 2017 until resigning in 2024[1] and has chaired The Business Council, an association of major U.S. chief executives. Nadella has cited the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the Indian poet Vikram Seth among his influences and is a regular cricket fan, particularly of the Indian national team and the Hyderabad Sunrisers franchise.

Compensation

Nadella's pay package is set by Microsoft's compensation committee and disclosed each year in the company's proxy statement (Form DEF 14A) filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The structure consists of a base salary, an annual cash incentive tied to performance metrics, and equity awards split between performance shares and time-vesting restricted stock units.

Fiscal year	Total reported compensation	Notable detail
FY2014	$84.3 million	Includes a one-time long-term performance stock award [39]
FY2023	$48.5 million	Base salary $2.5 million [40]
FY2024	$79.1 million	Increased about 63 percent year over year; Nadella requested a reduction in his cash incentive [40]
FY2025	$96.5 million	Highest annual package since he became CEO [15]

Nadella's net worth, which derives almost entirely from his Microsoft equity holdings rather than from any founder's stake, was estimated at approximately $1.1 billion by Forbes in 2025.[20] According to Microsoft's FY2024 proxy filing he held 867,989 shares of common stock at the time of disclosure.

References

"Satya Nadella." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella
"Satya Nadella appointed CEO of Microsoft." Microsoft News Center, February 4, 2014. https://news.microsoft.com/2014/02/04/satya-nadella-appointed-ceo-of-microsoft/
"Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn." Microsoft News Center, June 13, 2016. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-linkedin/
"Microsoft officially closes its $26.2B acquisition of LinkedIn." TechCrunch, December 8, 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/08/microsoft-officially-closes-its-26-2b-acquisition-of-linkedin/
"Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion." Microsoft News Center, June 4, 2018. https://news.microsoft.com/2018/06/04/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion/
"OpenAI forms exclusive computing partnership with Microsoft to build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies." Microsoft News Center, July 22, 2019. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2019/07/22/openai-forms-exclusive-computing-partnership-with-microsoft-to-build-new-azure-ai-supercomputing-technologies/
"Microsoft accelerates industry cloud strategy for healthcare with the acquisition of Nuance." Microsoft News Center, April 12, 2021. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2021/04/12/microsoft-accelerates-industry-cloud-strategy-for-healthcare-with-the-acquisition-of-nuance/
"Microsoft completes acquisition of Nuance, ushering in new era of outcomes-based AI." Microsoft News Center, March 4, 2022. https://news.microsoft.com/source/2022/03/04/microsoft-completes-acquisition-of-nuance-ushering-in-new-era-of-outcomes-based-ai/
"Microsoft and OpenAI extend partnership." Official Microsoft Blog, January 23, 2023. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/
"Microsoft's $68.7B Activision acquisition clears final hurdle as UK approves restructured deal." TechCrunch, October 12, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/12/microsofts-68-7b-activision-acquisition-clears-final-hurdle-as-uk-approves-restructured-deal/
"Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot." Official Microsoft Blog, March 19, 2024. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/
"4 days from fired to re-hired: A timeline of Sam Altman's ouster from OpenAI." ABC News, November 22, 2023. https://abcnews.com/Business/sam-altman-reaches-deal-return-ceo-openai/story?id=105091534
"Microsoft expects to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data centers in fiscal 2025." CNBC, January 3, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/03/microsoft-expects-to-spend-80-billion-on-ai-data-centers-in-fy-2025.html
"Microsoft unveils Majorana 1, the world's first quantum processor powered by topological qubits." Microsoft Azure Quantum Blog, February 19, 2025. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/quantum/2025/02/19/microsoft-unveils-majorana-1-the-worlds-first-quantum-processor-powered-by-topological-qubits/
"Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's total comp rises to $96.5 million." CNBC, October 21, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/21/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadellas-total-comp-rises-to-96point5-million.html
"Zain Nadella, 1996-2022: Microsoft CEO's son remembered." GeekWire, March 1, 2022. https://www.geekwire.com/2022/zain-nadella-1996-2022-microsoft-ceos-son-remembered-for-love-of-music-bright-smile-profound-impact-on-his-dad/
"Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other Seattle tech leaders join new Sounders soccer ownership group." GeekWire, August 13, 2019. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/longtime-seattle-tech-execs-including-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-join-new-sounders-fc-ownership-group/
"The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership." Official Microsoft Blog, April 27, 2026. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/04/27/the-next-phase-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/
"Microsoft officially tops $4 trillion in market cap, joining Nvidia in exclusive club." CNBC, July 30, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/microsoft-market-cap-tops-4-trillion-after-hours-on-earnings-beat.html
"Satya Nadella." Forbes profile. https://www.forbes.com/profile/satya-nadella/
"Reuters: Stephen Elop and Ford's Alan Mulally make Microsoft CEO shortlist." Engadget, November 5, 2013. https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-05-stephen-elop-ford-alan-mulally-microsoft-ceo-shortlist.html
"Microsoft to Invest $10 Billion in ChatGPT Maker OpenAI." Bloomberg, January 23, 2023. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/microsoft-makes-multibillion-dollar-investment-in-openai
"Microsoft to Pay Inflection AI $650 Million After Scooping Up Most of Staff." Bloomberg, March 21, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/microsoft-to-pay-inflection-ai-650-million-after-scooping-up-most-of-staff
"Microsoft and OpenAI evolve partnership to drive the next phase of AI." Official Microsoft Blog, January 21, 2025. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/01/21/microsoft-and-openai-evolve-partnership-to-drive-the-next-phase-of-ai/
"The next chapter of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership." Official Microsoft Blog, October 28, 2025. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/10/28/the-next-chapter-of-the-microsoft-openai-partnership/
"Introducing CoreAI - Platform and Tools." Official Microsoft Blog, January 13, 2025. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/01/13/introducing-core-ai-platform-and-tools/
"Introducing MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview." Microsoft AI, August 28, 2025. https://microsoft.ai/news/two-new-in-house-models/
"Microsoft forms superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman 'to serve humanity'." CNBC, November 6, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/microsoft-forms-superintelligence-team-under-ai-head-mustafa-suleyman-.html
"Expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot." Microsoft 365 Blog, September 24, 2025. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/09/24/expanding-model-choice-in-microsoft-365-copilot/
"Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announce strategic partnerships." Official Microsoft Blog, November 18, 2025. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-partnerships/
"Satya Nadella - Microsoft's AGI Plan & Quantum Breakthrough." Dwarkesh Podcast, February 19, 2025. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella
"Microsoft Fiscal Year 2025 Fourth Quarter Earnings." Microsoft Investor Relations, July 30, 2025. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2025/earnings-fy-2025-q4
"Microsoft CEO Nadella says layoffs have been 'weighing heavily' on him." CNBC, July 24, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/24/microsoft-satya-nadella-memo-layoffs.html
"Microsoft sales chief Althoff gets new role as CEO of company's commercial business." CNBC, October 1, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/01/microsoft-makes-sales-chief-althoff-ceo-of-commercial-business.html
"Microsoft stock drops 5% as Azure growth slows amid capex surge." Fortune, January 28, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/01/28/microsoft-stock-drops-azure-growth-slows-capex-spending-q2/
"Microsoft seeks to be AI's center of gravity again. CEO Satya Nadella is in San Francisco to make the case." Fortune, June 2, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/06/02/microsoft-moves-to-remain-ais-center-of-gravity/
"Satya Nadella wins the Financial Times Person of the Year." Windows Central, December 2019. https://www.windowscentral.com/satya-nadella-wins-financial-times-person-year
"Georgia Tech Presents Satya Nadella With Honorary Degree." Georgia Tech News Center, January 25, 2024. https://news.gatech.edu/news/2024/01/25/georgia-tech-presents-satya-nadella-honorary-degree
"Microsoft CEO Nadella Received Pay Package of $84 Million." Bloomberg, October 20, 2014. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-20/microsoft-s-pay-package-was-84-million-in-fiscal-2014
"Microsoft CEO Nadella asked for pay reduction after security slip, but total comp still rose 63%." CNBC, October 24, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/24/microsoft-ceo-nadella-requested-pay-reduction-after-security-incidents.html
"MICROSOFT CORP Form 10-Q (quarter ended March 31, 2026)." U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000789019&type=10-Q
"Microsoft aimed for $92B return on OpenAI investment, Nadella says." Cryptopolitan, May 2026. https://www.cryptopolitan.com/microsofts-92-billion-openai-target/

Editing: Satya Nadella