Neal Mohan: How YouTube's Indian-Origin CEO Became TIME's 2025 CEO of the Year

TIME Magazine has honored YouTube CEO Neal Mohan as their 2025 CEO of the Year. Since assuming leadership in 2023, Mohan has steered YouTube through a period of significant transformation. TIME's recognition portrays him as an influential cultural curator who shapes digital content consumed by billions worldwide.

"Mohan is the farmer; what he cultivates will be what we eat," TIME eloquently states in their feature.

"YouTube provides the soil, and everyone comes and plants whatever nourishing or noxious plants they care to... In many ways, YouTube is creating the cultural diet that the globe is beginning to subsist on."

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1973, Neal Mohan, now 52, has a multicultural background. During the mid-1980s, his Tamil parents relocated to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, where he became proficient in Hindi and studied Sanskrit. He later observed similarities between Sanskrit's structured rules and computer programming languages.

Mohan and his siblings eventually returned to the United States to pursue higher education. He completed both his undergraduate studies and MBA at Stanford University. Tragically, his brother Anuj passed away at age 30 in a swimming pool accident.

His professional journey began in consulting before joining NetGravity, a digital advertising startup. After NetGravity was acquired by DoubleClick, Mohan remained with the company and played a key role in its $3.1 billion acquisition by Google in 2007. Despite considering a move to Twitter, he chose to stay at Google following a retention offer.

The DoubleClick acquisition connected Mohan with Susan Wojcicki, who later became YouTube's CEO. She recruited him to YouTube where they collaborated closely for years. When Wojcicki shared her cancer diagnosis with Mohan, which ultimately led to her passing in August 2024, he assumed many of her responsibilities during her treatment before officially succeeding her as CEO in 2023.

In 2021, former US President Donald Trump and others filed a lawsuit against YouTube after Trump's channel was suspended following the January 6 Capitol riot, claiming the suspension violated free speech rights. The case continued even after YouTube reinstated the channel in 2023.

Under Mohan's leadership, YouTube resolved the lawsuit in September 2025 with a $24.5 million settlement without admitting wrongdoing. Of this amount, $22 million was allocated to a nonprofit supporting a White House ballroom project, with the remainder distributed among other plaintiffs.

Mohan has three children—two daughters and a son—with his wife, Hema Sareen Mohan.