Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella faces the AI arms race with urgency—and a little paranoia

(Credit: Dimas Ardian—Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Good morning.

In his decade as CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has transformed a troubled tech giant into the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap of more than $3.1 trillion. In his 32 years at Microsoft, though, Nadella has lived through four major technology platform shifts—from PCs to the web, mobile, cloud computing and now AI—and he knows how the company struggled to compete after some of them. That may explain the air of urgency and mild paranoia that Nadella projects in Fortune’s latest cover story on Nadella by my colleague Jeremy Kahn.

As Nadella told Jeremy: “When the paradigm shifts, do you have something to contribute? Because there is no God-given right to exist if you don’t have anything relevant.”