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Open AI CEO Sam Altman will attend the secretive Bilderberg Meeting, an annual gathering of over 100 political and corporate leaders from Europe and North America, which has announced AI as a key item on its agenda this year. Altman isn’t the only Big Tech figure in attendance. Other participants include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will also attend. As noted in a congressional hearing last week, CISA played a key role as a source of government pressure in...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son, Zain, died at age 26 on Monday following a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, according to reports. The tech firm informed its top executives of Zain Nadella’s passing in an email. The message asked the executives to send their thoughts and prayers to the Nadella family. Nadella’s son — the eldest of his three children — experienced asphyxiation in utero and was born weighing just 3 pounds. Zain Nadella received care at Seattle Children’s Hospital for much of his life.

Parag Agrawal, who was appointed this week as Twitter's CEO, has joined at least a dozen other Indian-born techies in the corner offices of the world's most influential Silicon Valley companies. Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, and the top bosses of IBM, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, VMWare and Vimeo are all of Indian descent. Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce - and yet are disproportionately represented in the top brass. Why? "No other nation in the world 'trains' so many citizens in such a gladiatorial manner as India...

A lot has been made of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s stock sales, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently sold a chunk of stock that is a much larger portion of his total holdings. Nadella sold about half his stake in Microsoft (ticker: MSFT), according to recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The CEO unloaded 838,584 shares on Nov. 22 and 23, netting him about $285 million. He has about 831,000 Microsoft shares left, worth roughly $280 million. It isn’t clear why he sold. Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the sales or to make...

[FULL TITLE: Congrats, Satya Nadella. In just five years, you've turned Microsoft from Neutral Evil to, er, merely True Neutral] The hits, misses, and axings by the newish CEO Stepping into the sweaty shoes of Steve Ballmer was never going to be an easy task. Satya Nadella’s first five years as third CEO of the software giant has brought pain to fans of Microsoft's consumer tech but delight to investors.For many, Nadella is seen as the axeman, ruthlessly cutting through Redmond's detritus amid the rise of Apple, Google, and others. We at El Reg love a list, so we present...

On Thursday, February 4, Satya Nadella will celebrate his second anniversary as the CEO of Microsoft. It's been an eventful couple of years. Microsoft has grown its crucial cloud business, released Windows 10 to a much better reception than its loathed predecessor, launched a bunch of great apps for iPhone and Android, and generally made people like it a lot more. But the real victory of Satya Nadella — the truly monumental shift — has been within the company. Under Nadella, Microsoft is pointed in one direction for first time in modern memory.

Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer has a huge holding of Microsoft stock. At yesterday's shareholder meeting, he tore into the company and its current CEO, Satya Nadella, cursing about the financial reporting and saying a key part of its strategy "won't work." Ouch. Far be it for you humble blogwatcher to repeat the actual naughty word Ballmer used. Let's just say he was alluding to bovine excrement. NSFW language aside, the ex-CEO seems unhappy about changes made to the Windows Phone strategy he put in place. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers settle in with some delicious popped corn. Not to mention: He loves...

The long reigning king of the desktop OS is in trouble. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is rapidly steering the company into the back office and service spaces, while their nascent mobile and desktop platforms are crumbling around them. Microsoft is putting on a brave face continuing to heavily advertise the 2-in-1 Surface debacle, but Nadella is only buying time, as he must surely know that Apple and Google is the two-headed beast that Microsoft can not stop. In less than a decade, Microsoft will be associated with IBM or Oracle, not Apple or Google. Apple’s iOS is poised for...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Windows has been re-architected to give it a central role in the IoT (Internet of things. He sees the company's upcoming operating system Windows 10 as integral in managing every aspect of the IoT, from the sensors, mechanical systems, to the applications and analytics that underlie it. Appearing at Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo conference on Tuesday, Nadella described Windows 10 as the first step in an entirely new generation of Windows "as opposed to 'it's just another release after Windows 8.' " Nadella, appointed Microsoft's CEO early this year, said Windows is not just about tablets, phones...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has brought down his axe again, sending off the next batch of the 18,000 employees he has promised will lose their jobs by the end of the year. The Redmond supremo issued about 2,100 pink slips on Thursday, the Seattle Times reports, bringing the total number of layoffs to approximately 15,100 and counting. Throughout the process, Nadella has maintained that most of the cuts will come from Microsoft's new devices and services business, which it bought from Nokia in April. Professional positions and manufacturing jobs in Nokia's factories around the world will be eliminated, he said....

Three months ago Microsoft announced that long-time Microsoftie Satya Nadella would become the company's third-ever CEO.That has turned out to be a very smart choice.In a few short weeks, the company has a fresh outlook and a more respectful attitude toward all of its constituents, its customers, developers and, most especially, its competitors.The sunny outlook is infectious. Microsoft's stock is trading at a 14-year high, hovering around $40 share.A quick tour of what's been going on at Microsoft shows the company making changes at a feverish pace.Within the past few days ...Nadella proved that Microsoft's war with Apple is over....

On the day that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) told a local newspaper that she believed amnesty legislation could be brought to the floor by August, she met with Satya Nadella, the new CEO of Microsoft. “I believe there is a path that we get a bill on the floor by August,” House GOP Conference Chair McMorris Rodgers said last Friday. “We’re going to have to push that this is a legal status, not amnesty." That same day, she tweeted a photo of herself with Nadella from her verified @cathymcmorris Twitter account.

The big news from Microsoft today was that it has finally launched Office for iPad, which will give users full access to the popular productivity suite if they sign up for the Office 365 subscription service. But under the surface of the announcement, we got our first look at CEO Satya Nadella's broader vision for Microsoft's future. Nadella has only been CEO for 52 days, but we're already getting a sense of how he plans to expand the company's offerings beyond its core products like Windows. In short, Nadella sees Microsoft powering all sorts of devices through services and apps...

Dan Lyons, the writer behind Fake Steve Jobs, has found someone willing to bucket incoming Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.That someone is Joachim Kempin, who was general manager of Microsoft Germany in the subsidiary's early days and rose to become a senior veep in charge of Microsoft's OEM business. Kempin has form criticising Microsoft, as he penned a volume titled Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft’s "secret power broker" breaks his silence and hasn't been shy talking it up by dishing some dirt.Little wonder, then that he found something unpleasant to say about Nadella when chatting to Lyons.The choice bits? Microsoft has “found...

Microsoft’s cloud chief, Satya Nadella, will lead the company as its next chief executive, according to a report from Bloomberg. Microsoft’s board is “preparing to name” Nadella chief executive, Bloomberg reported Thursday afternoon. Nadella, whose official title is executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, had been one of the front-runners in the race to replace current chief executive Steve Ballmer, who said last August that he planned to step down within a year. But the board is also considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman of the company, Bloomberg reported, ousting the company’s co-founder and possibly replacing him...