Microsoft's Share Price Surged 10-Fold Under Satya Nadella

A little less than 10 years ago, on February 4, 2014, Satya Nadella took over as CEO at Microsoft, following in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. It wasn’t an easy situation to come in for Nadella, considering that Microsoft had missed the transition to mobile devices, Windows 8 had flopped terribly and the PC market had started its decline, putting Microsoft’s core business, Windows, into question.

“Having worked with him for more than 20 years, I know that Satya is the right leader at the right time for Microsoft,” said Steve Ballmer, when Nadella was announced as his successor. And right he was. Having managed the transformation to the cloud infrastructure and services business before being appointed CEO, Nadella doubled down on this transformation as CEO, turning Microsoft’s "Intelligent Cloud" business into an industry-leading powerhouse that generated almost $90 billion in revenue in the latest completed fiscal year.

Back in 2014, most people given the choice to invest $1,000 in either Microsoft, Apple or any other of the so-called GAFAM group probably would have snubbed Microsoft in favor of Apple, considering the huge success that Microsoft’s old foe was having with its mobile devices, most importantly the iPhone. And yet, here we are, 10 years into Nadella’s tenure and Microsoft is not only the most valuable public company on the planet, it has also outperformed Apple (and other rivals) over the past decade. As the following chart shows, Microsoft’s share price grew by 969 percent since Nadella took over, beating Apple’s 923-percent increase over the same period as well as Amazon, Meta and Alphabet. The S&P 500 index "only" increased by 173 percent over the past 10 years, illustrating once again how well the tech sector has performed in the near past.