Six Indian Americans among Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful People in Business

Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Shantanu Narayen, Neal Mohan, Vinod Khosla and Tarang Amin on the list topped by Elon Musk

By Arun Kumar

Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella, Alphabet (Google) CEO Sundar Pichai and four other Indian Americans figure in Fortune’s inaugural 2024 list of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business.

Topped by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, this annual ranking celebrates founders, chief executives, disrupters, and innovators from 40 industries who have had a substantial impact on their industries and beyond.

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 are the other Indian Americans on the list. Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, is the only Indian business leader to make the list.

READ: Indian math whiz startup Bhanzu secures Epiq funding (November 12th, 2024)

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, Microsoft CEO and Chairman, has successfully led Microsoft through not one but two major transformations in his decade at the helm of the world’s largest software company—first from PCs to the cloud, and now to AI, according to Fortune.

His prescient early bet on OpenAI has helped put Microsoft at the pinnacle of Big Tech’s upper echelon, with a market capitalization—at $3.1 trillion—to match, it says.

Under his leadership, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service steadily gained market share from Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s 365 suite of business productivity software remains ubiquitous across industries. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot meanwhile has become a must-have tool for every software developer.

“And Nadella is not sitting still, continuing 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,” it says.

“Considered one of the sharpest strategic minds in management today as well as a charismatic and empathetic leader, he has the ear of Fortune 500 CEOs, startup founders, investors, and presidents and prime ministers,” says Fortune.

Sundar Pichai, Alphabet (Google) CEO, 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.

But Pichai, who joined Google in 2004 and rose through the ranks to succeed cofounder Larry Page at the top job, knows that he can’t sit still, says Fortune. 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, the magazine notes.

Pichai has shaken up the company’s internal AI teams in a series of reorgs. In August, he licensed startup Character.AI’s chatbot technology, rehiring the founder—a former Googler—as part of the deal. The reported price tag: $2.7 billion.

Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO and Chair, is all in on artificial intelligence. After years of sounding the alarm about deepfake technology, he’s set out to reassure the company’s customer base of creatives that generative AI is here to enhance, not replace, their talents.

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, who became CEO in 2007, has grown Adobe’s annual revenue from $3 billion, when he was appointed, to more than $19 billion at the end of last year, the magazine noted.

Neal Mohan, CEO YouTube, wasn’t exactly a household name when he was appointed to the to job in 2023, taking the baton from Susan Wojcicki. Within tech circles, however, Mohan had a reputation as an advertising-savvy executive whose steady hand and focus on internal processes were instrumental to the success of YouTube, where he served as head of product and policy, according to Fortune.

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, it says.

Vinod Khosla, Managing Partner and Founder Khosla Ventures, is one of the most influential investors in Silicon Valley. Originally from India, Khosla, 69, in 1982 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, Khosla 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.

Tarang Amin, CEO and Chairman e.l.f. Beauty. It’s notoriously hard for a startup to disrupt the beauty giants, but that’s exactly what Amin, has done, according to Fortune.

“Over a decade leading the beauty brand he 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 to hordes of Instagram-obsessive makeup fans” it says.

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. Amin got his start at Procter & Gamble, relaunching Pantene in the early 1990s. He also serves on the board of directors for J.M. Smucker Co.

Mukesh Ambani, chairman of India’s Reliance Industries, was Asia’s richest person, with an estimated net worth of around $100 billion, as of early November. Reliance is one of India’s most important conglomerates, with interests in petrochemicals, retail, entertainment, and telecommunications (and much more).