Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, posted over the weekend that the best CEO of the year in his mind is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "Nadella is CEO of the year," Gerber wrote, adding, "If he works hard, he could be Microsoft's CEO of the decade. He has positioned Microsoft perfectly for the next decade."
Microsoft is the third-largest holding of Gerber's flagship fund, AdvisorSharesGerberKawasakiETF, with a weight of 7.73%.
After Musk's recent posts supporting so-called "anti-Semitic" remarks caused controversy, Gerber strongly criticized Musk, saying that his actions had caused huge damage to the Tesla brand, and claimed that he would sell the Tesla Model Y he was driving and replace it with a Rivian electric car.
Nadella took over Microsoft from co-founders Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in February 2014. Under Nadella's leadership, Microsoft's revenue increased from $86.83 billion in fiscal 2014 to $198.27 billion in fiscal 2023, and GAAP net profit increased from $22.07 billion to $72.74 billion.
Much of this growth can be attributed to Nadella's "cloud first, mobile first" strategy, which puts Microsoft at the forefront of emerging technologies. Under his leadership, Microsoft's cloud business has flourished and the company has become a top cloud computing company.
With the rise of OpenAI's artificial intelligence chat tool ChatGPT, Nadella also moved quickly to deepen Microsoft's ties with the company, investing $10 billion in OpenAI earlier this year.
During the recent OpenAI "coup" controversy, Nadella supported the company's co-founder Sam Altman. With the support of him and other OpenAI investors, Altman was finally able to return to the artificial intelligence company and posted a post expressing his gratitude to Nadella and promising to establish a "strong" partnership with Microsoft.