Micron’s Indian-origin CEO included in Forbes Billionaires list:Sanjay rejected Kodak’s offer and took SanDisk to every home

American chip company Micron Technology’s CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has been included in Forbes’ list of chip company billionaires. According to Forbes, his wealth is Rs 11,406 crore. He is the only Indian included in this list. At the top of this list is NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang whose net worth is Rs 17.46 lakh crore. Kanpur-born Mehrotra (67) has made significant contributions from co-founding SanDisk to taking Micron to a market cap of Rs 104 lakh crore.
In 1976, Sanjay applied for a student visa to study engineering in America, but the embassy refused three times. Finally, his father accompanied him to the New Delhi embassy and stayed put in the lobby despite the counselor officer going for lunch. Eventually, he got the visa. During his first job at Intel, he would work until 2 AM at night. In 1988, Sanjay founded SanDisk together with two friends. At that time, flash memory was a new technology, but Sanjay bet on it. Going forward, SanDisk played a major role in bringing pen drives, SD cards, and mobile memory to the world. In the 90s, when SanDisk was a startup, Kodak offered to have their digital memory technology built exclusively for them and promised a large sum of money in return, but Sanjay and his partner Eli Harari rejected it. They decided to keep the technology as an open standard. This very thinking led to the creation of Compact Flash and later SD cards, which are used in every device today. During the same period, when the global recession hit, pressure mounted on the company, but Sanjay chose a different path instead of laying off employees. He reduced his basic salary to zero and also cut the salaries of senior executives. He believed that in difficult times, leadership should make sacrifices first. This decision earned him special trust among employees. He preferred technology over position, so he even quit his job In the 80s, Sanjay was at IDT. The company was ready to offer him a better position, but the non-volatile memory project he was working on was shut down. Then, due to his preferred technology, he resigned from his job. Later he said, ‘I was obsessed with memory.’ This very determination became the foundation of SanDisk. In 2017, he joined Micron, which is now building a Rs 26,000 crore chip facility in Sanand, Gujarat, in which the company’s stake is Rs 7,838 crore.