Indian-origin CEOs beat Wall Street? Viral backtest of Michael Milken remark sparks debate – Firstpost

A social media post by Indian-origin tech entrepreneur Debarghya Das has reignited debate around the growing influence of Indian-born executives in corporate America, after he claimed that billionaire financier Michael Milken’s tongue-in-cheek investment theory would have dramatically outperformed the broader US stock market over the past 15 years.

Das, popularly known online as “Deedy”, shared a post on X citing an old remark by Milken, who had once joked that whenever a US company replaced an American-born chief executive with one born in India, he would buy the stock.

“Billionaire Michael Milken joked ‘if a US company replaces the US-born CEO with a CEO born in India, I buy the stock’,” Das wrote.

“But he reveals he hasn’t backtested the idea. So we did,” he added.

According to Das, investing in companies led by Indian-born CEOs over the past 15 years would have “50x’d your money”, delivering roughly 7.5 times more returns and more than double the internal rate of return compared with the benchmark S&P 500.

“In the last 15yrs, that would’ve 50x’d your money: 7.5x more $$ and >2x IRR vs S&P500: 30% vs 14%!” the post said.

The claim quickly went viral, drawing millions of views and triggering a wider conversation around the rise of Indian-origin executives in the American technology sector.

However, Das later clarified that the findings showed only a correlation and not necessarily causation.
“Correlation is not causation, of course,” he wrote in a follow-up post.

“Indian CEOs are disproportionately tech stocks which have happened to do well in the last 15 years. Was just an interesting observation.”

Here are the results: pic.twitter.com/JgWAMfgKdj

— Deedy (@deedydas) May 12, 2026

The debate comes at a time when several of America’s biggest technology companies are headed by Indian-born executives, including Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Arvind Krishna at IBM.