Talk of succession atop Big Tech grows louder

MOST BOSSES, even of multibillion-dollar businesses, are anonymous to anyone who is not their employee or an equity analyst. Except, that is, technology bosses—and not just founders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Many bystanders are familiar with the bespectacled visages of Satya Nadella, who runs Microsoft, or Tim Cook, from Apple. Over the next year or so people may need to learn some new faces.

The first notable tech succession of the decade was announced on January 30th, when IBM said that Arvind Krishna will take over from Ginni Rometty, a rare female Big Tech boss, in April. Two days later Sandeep Mathrani was named as the chief executive of WeWork, a troubled pseudo-tech firm which rents office space. In December Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, handed control of Alphabet, the search firm’s parent company, to Sundar Pichai, who ran its core business.