Every day, billions of people use products and services developed by a relatively small number of large companies: they search for information on Google, communicate via WhatsApp and Instagram, work with Microsoft software, shop on Amazon or use devices produced by Apple. Behind these technologies and devices, which have become an integral part of the daily life of a huge portion of the world’s population, there are companies with a total market value of trillions of dollars and with an ever-increasing ability to influence not only the technology sector, but also the economy, politics and society in general and which will have a concrete impact on the future.
For this reason, knowing who makes decisions at the top of the so-called big tech companies can be interesting in some ways: their names often appear in economic and technological news, but the paths that led them to lead some of the most powerful companies on the planet are ignored by most. Among the number ones in big tech there are engineers, computer scientists, economists and even entrepreneurs who have not completed university. Let’s see who the CEOs of the main big tech companies are and what path they have followed, including the new CEO of Apple, John Ternus.
- 1NVIDIA: Jensen Huang
- 2Microsoft: Satya Nadella
- 3Alphabet (Google): Sundar Pichai
- 4Apple: John Ternus
- 5Amazon: Andy Jassy
- 6Meta: Mark Zuckerberg
NVIDIA: Jensen Huang
NVIDIA has become one of the symbolic companies of the artificial intelligence revolution: it mainly produces chips and GPUs, fundamental for graphics processing and, above all, for the training of modern AI systems. Its founder and CEO is Jensen Huang, who was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States at the age of 9.
He graduated in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984 (when Steve Jobs was working on the presentation of the Macintosh, just to give a place in time) and then obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1992 (the year in which Microsoft released the Windows 3.1 operating system, a technological era ago). Before founding NVIDIA in 1993 he had worked in the semiconductor industry for AMD and LSI Logic.
Microsoft: Satya Nadella
Microsoft has been developing software for more than 50 years and, in slightly more recent times, also cloud services and artificial intelligence technologies. Its current CEO, Satya Nadella, was born in India and represents the perfect example of how climbing all the hierarchical steps of a technological giant of the caliber of Microsoft is not impossible.
After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in computer science and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Nadella worked for Sun Microsystems until 1992, when he joined Microsoft. He later led the cloud division before becoming CEO in 2014.
Alphabet (Google): Sundar Pichai
Alphabet is the holding company that controls Google and numerous other technological businesses, from online search to Android, via YouTube and much more. Its CEO, Sundar Pichai, was also born in India. Before becoming CEO of Google in 2015 and of Alphabet in 2019, he studied metallurgical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, then obtained a master’s degree at Stanford and an MBA at the Wharton School.
He joined Google in 2004 and helped develop products such as Chrome, Drive and Android.
Apple: the new CEO John Ternus
Apple is famous for its consumer electronic products spread throughout the world, such as iPhone, Mac, iPad and Apple Watch. From 1 September 2026 the new CEO is John Ternus, who succeeded Tim Cook after 15 years. Ternus is a mechanical engineer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 and first worked at Virtual Research Systems, designing virtual reality headsets. Having joined Apple in 2001, he spent over twenty years at the company, reaching the point of directing hardware engineering and supervising the development of numerous products, including the new proprietary Apple Silicon chips based on ARM architecture, which in 2020 began to completely replace Intel’s x86 chips.
Amazon: Andy Jassy
If you were to answer the question “Who is the CEO of Amazon?“, it is likely that you too would get the wrong answer by indicating Jeff Bezos as the company’s CEO. Yes, because the e-commerce giant, born as an online bookstore and today a leader in logistics and above all in cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), has been led since 2021 by CEO Andy Jassy.
After a degree from Harvard and an MBA from Harvard Business School, he joined Amazon in 1997. His journey is particularly significant because he helped create AWS, which has become one of the most important cloud infrastructures in the world.
Meta: Mark Zuckerberg
Meta controls an important portion of social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and is also involved in the development of artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, represents an exception compared to his other “colleagues”, since, while studying at Harvard, he left his studies during his second year at the prestigious American university to focus on his first “creature”, at the time called Thefacebook (the year was 2004).
He is one of the few major contemporary CEOs, along with the CEO of NVIDIA, to still lead the company he founded.
