Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Mukesh Ambani Among Fortune’s Inaugural ‘100 Most Powerful People in Business’

Several Indian Americans are among Fortune’s inaugural ‘100 Most Powerful People in Business,’ a list of founders, chief executives,  disrupters, and innovators from 40 industries. They include Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella, Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai, Adobe CEO and chair Shantanu Narayen, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Khosla Ventures managing partner and founder Vinod Khosla, and e.l.f. Beauty CEO and chairman Tarang Amin. Also listed is Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries.  

Fortune says those included in the list share a vital trait. “Their “words, deeds, and wealth shape what others around them think and do. They might exercise their power by shouting in headlines, or via subtle nudges behind closed doors.”

Satya Nadella has “successfully led Microsoft through not one but two major transformations in his decade at the helm of the world’s largest software company, from PCs to the cloud, and now to AI,” Fortune says.  After the success of several Microsoft products under his leadership, Nadella is “ontinuing to invest in Microsoft’s internal AI capabilities as well as placing savvy bets on up-and-coming startups in fields from driverless cars to quantum computing,’ the magazine adds. 

As the CEO of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai “helms one of the world’s most powerful tech conglomerates, with best-of-breed businesses such as Google, YouTube, Android, and Waymo self-driving cars under its flag, along with a market cap in excess of $2 trillion,” according to Fortune.  But Pichai can’t sit still, the magazine notes. “Antitrust regulators are itching to break up the company, which generated $74 billion in profit last year, while the advent of generative AI threatens to undercut the search advertising business that produced much of that profit,” Fortune notes. 

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is all in on artificial intelligence. This year, Adobe released 100 new AI features across its suite of creative cloud services, and while most of those tools are included in standard subscription pricing, forthcoming video features will likely come at a higher price point. Narayen has grown Adobe’s annual revenue from $3 billion, when he was appointed, to more than $19 billion at the end of last year.

Neal Mohan wasn’t exactly a household name when he was appointed YouTube CEO in 2023, taking the baton from Susan Wojcicki.  As CEO, the blazer-wearing Mohan has doubled down on Shorts, YouTube’s short-form video clips product that competes with TikTok and Instagram Reels, adding new AI capabilities and courting creators through revenue sharing. YouTube Music and Premium, meanwhile, have now surpassed 100 million subscribers, while YouTube TV now counts more than 8 million paid subscribers.

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Vinod Khosla, 69, is one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley. In 1982 he cofounded Sun Microsystems, which pioneered a range of open-source software. He then spent 18 years at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, where he invested in successful fiber-optic and internet companies during the 1990s. One of the more noteworthy was Juniper Networks, which went public in 1999, generating a 2,500-times return for Kleiner. In 2004, he launched his own firm, which has invested in health care, sustainability, and AI startups. Khosla made perhaps his biggest bet in 2019 when his firm wrote a $50 million check to OpenAI. He was also one of the first to demand that OpenAI rehire CEO Sam Altman after the startup’s board fired him late last year. More recently, Khosla has gained notice for predicting that most jobs will be replaced by AI.

Over a decade leading  e.l.f. Beauty, Tarang Amin  has struck fear in the hearts of global rivals by selling simply branded e.l.f. (which stands for eyes, lips, face), eye palettes and lip glosses for a fraction of what other brands charge. Under his leadership, the business has notched a stunning 22 straight quarters of sales growth. In fiscal 2024, the company brought in more than $1 billion in total revenue, around 77% higher than the previous year. The business agreed to acquire skin-care brand Naturium in 2023 for $355 million.

As of early November, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of India’s Reliance Industries, was Asia’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of around $100 billion. Reliance is one of India’s most important conglomerates, with interests in petrochemicals, retail, entertainment, and telecommunications (and much more). Ambani is trying to groom the next generation to take over the lumbering conglomerate: Akash, his eldest son, is the chairman of the telecoms business Reliance Jio, while his daughter Isha is driving the growth of Reliance’s retail arm.