Heather Knight of London Spirit hits out during The Hundred final at Lord's Cricket Ground in London on Aug. 18.
Photographer: Philip Brown/Getty Images
How CEOs of Microsoft, Google, Palo Alto Bought an English Cricket Team
Indian industrialists, American sports investors and technology executives joined a bidding war for franchises in a startup cricket league
Late last year, Nikesh Arora, billionaire CEO of cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, was hanging out in his California home with his friend, vice chairman of Indian tech conglomerate Times Internet, Satyan Gajwani, when the pair got to talking about cricket.
Gajwani is a co-founder of Major League Cricket, a US league that launched in 2023. Arora has a stake in one of its teams. They were discussing ways to grow the business when Gajwani mentioned another upstart tournament, which had just begun looking for capital on the other side of the Atlantic. They called some more friends: Satya Nadella, Microsoft Inc.’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, the head of Google parent Alphabet Inc., and Shantanu Narayen, who runs Adobe Inc.