Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai figure among the top ten in the Fortune 100 Most Powerful People in Business list headed by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.
Three other Indian Americans — Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, Vertex Pharmaceuticals CEO Reshma Kewalramani and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan — and two Indian tycoons — Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani also make the list.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, and Wang Chuanfu of BYD are in the Top 5 in the second-annual ranking of the most influential people in the world of business representing 28 industries globally.
Nineteen of the list’s CEOs and leaders are female, including Julie Sweet of Accenture (No. 11), Jane Fraser of Citigroup (No. 12), Lisa Su of AMD (No. 14), and Ana Botín of Banco Santander (No. 20).
People of Indian origin on the list are:
Ranked 2, 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—first from PCs to the cloud, and now to AI, according to Fortune.
READ: 5 Indian Americans in inaugural TIME100 Creators list (July 10, 2025)
His prescient early bet on OpenAI helped put Microsoft in the pole position of the generative AI race. But competitors such as Alphabet’s Google have been catching up. Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI is reportedly tense, as OpenAI seeks to remake its corporate structure and increasingly competes directly with Microsoft for customers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own consumer-focused AI efforts have failed to catch fire so far. Still, Microsoft remains firmly ensconced in Big Tech’s upper echelon, with a market capitalization north of $3.7 trillion.
Under Nadella’s 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.
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.
Ranked 6, Alphabet CEO 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.
READ: Six Indian Americans among Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful People in Business (November 14, 2024)
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. Antitrust regulators are itching to break up the company, which generated $100 billion in profit last year, while the advent of generative AI threatens to undercut the search advertising business that produced much of that profit.
Pichai has shaken up the company’s internal AI teams in a series of reorgs, keeping Google’s homegrown Gemini models among the industry front-runners, and made significant progress weaving AI across its product line, including the so-called AI overviews that increasingly appear in search results.
Ranked 38, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen 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 has been integrating new AI features, deepening customer engagement, and substantially expanding the company’s annual recurring revenue to date. In July, Adobe inked a deal with the Premier League to partner on the league’s digital fan experiences. Narayen, who became CEO in 2007, has grown Adobe’s annual revenue from $3 billion, when he was appointed, to more than $21 billion at the end of 2024.
Ranked 56, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of India’s Reliance Industries, knows how to throw a party. Business leaders (and fellow MPP listees) such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Samsung’s Jay Lee made the trek to India last year to attend some of the months-long wedding festivities of Ambani’s youngest son, Anant. As of early July, Ambani 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, telecommunications, and much more. Ambani is trying to groom the next generation to take over the lumbering Reliance: Akash, his eldest son, is chairman of the telecoms business Reliance Jio, while his daughter, Isha, is driving the growth of Reliance’s retail arm.
Ranked 62, Reshma Kewalramani, who brings her experience as a licensed doctor to her leadership, took the helm as CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals in 2020, having previously served as the biopharma company’s chief medical officer.
Vertex, valued at over $110 billion, has become a major player in drug discovery. This year, the company gained FDA approval for a new opioid-free pain drug, Journavx, the first in two decades. Vertex is best known for developing multiple novel drug combinations to treat cystic fibrosis, which affects 100,000 people globally.
READ: Reshma Kewalramani among 2025 Time 100 most influential people (April 17, 2025)
Ranked 83, Neal Mohan wasn’t exactly a household name when he was appointed YouTube CEO 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.
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 125 million paid subscribers, while YouTube TV counts more than 8 million.
Ranked 96, Gautam Adani is one of India’s most influential—and arguably most controversial—business figures. He’s also one of India’s richest people, thanks to his flagship company, the Adani Group. Founded in 1988 as a commodity trading house, the business has now expanded to ports, power, mining, and renewable energy.
Adani is seen as a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; both come from the state of Gujarat, and the two have known each other since Modi’s time as the state’s chief minister. That has led to political scrutiny at home, as India’s opposition parties accuse Adani of benefiting from his close ties to India’s leadership.
And in the U.S., prosecutors accused Adani of a $250 million bribery scheme. The Adani Group has denied the allegations, but its stock has yet to recover.