Zain Nadella, the son of Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella died at 26. He was born on August 13, 1996 with celebral palsy. The Microsoft Corporation in an email told to executive staff that Zain Nadella had passed away.
Zain Nadella, the son of Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, died on monday morning. He was 26 years old and had been born with cerebral palsy.
The Microsoft Corporation in an email told to executive staff that Zain Nadella had passed away. The message asked executives to hold the family in their thoughts and prayers while giving them space to grieve privately.
Since taking over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, Nadella has focused the company on designing products to better serve users with disabilities and cited lessons he learned raising and supporting Zain, Bloomberg reported.
Last year, the Children’s Hospital, where Zain received much of his treatment, joined with Nadella and his wife Anu to establish the Zain Nadella Endowed Chair in Pediatric Neurosciences, as part of Seattle Children’s Center for Integrative Brain Research.
“Zain will be remembered for his eclectic taste in music, his bright sunny smile and the immense joy he brought to his family and all those who loved him,” Jeff Sperring, CEO of Children’s Hospital, wrote in a message to his Board, which was shared with Microsoft executives.
In a blogpost in 2017, Satya Nadella wrote about his son’s birth and upbringing. How Satya and his wife Anu felt after giving birth to Zain Nadella, who was born with cerebral palsy. As per that blogpost, Zain Nadella was born on August 13, 1996.
“One night, during the thirty-sixth week of her pregnancy, Anu noticed that the baby was not moving as much as she was accustomed to. So we went to the emergency room of a local hospital in Bellevue. We thought it would be just a routine checkup, little more than new parent anxiety. In fact, I distinctly remember feeling annoyed by the wait times we experienced in the emergency room. But upon examination, the doctors were alarmed enough to order an emergency cesarean section. Zain was born at 11:29 p.m. on August 13, 1996, all of three pounds. He did not cry,” Satya Nadella wrote.
“Zain was transported from the hospital in Bellevue across Lake Washington to Seattle Children’s Hospital with its state-of-the-art Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Anu began her recovery from the difficult birth. I spent the night with her in the hospital and immediately went to see Zain the next morning. Little did I know then how profoundly our lives would change. Over the course of the next couple of years we learned more about the damage caused by in utero asphyxiation, and how Zain would require a wheelchair and be reliant on us because of severe cerebral palsy. I was devastated. But mostly I was sad for how things turned out for me and Anu.”