“If you seek success, start with tenacity.”
That’s what Sanjay Mehrotra took away from not one, but three US visa rejections in 1976. Today, he continues to serve as chairman, president and CEO of the American multinational semiconductor giant Micron Technology, a role he has held since 2017.
Born in Kanpur in 1958, Mehrotra almost missed out on becoming the pioneer responsible for rolling the dice on multiple significant chapters of tech history had it not been for his father’s persistence in helping him secure clearance to enter the United States.
Fifty years ago, he faced an immigration scare that especially threatens the chances of countless foreign nationals, including natives of India, to now come to ‘The Land of Opportunity’ under the Donald Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Even as the Republican politician continues to clamp down on pathways to legal immigration in 2026 to push for his ‘America First’ agenda, Mehrotra is one of the few Indian-born executives who has not only earned Trump’s favour, but is even included in his inner (tech) circle owing to his own contributions to pave the way for MAGA’s foundation.
Present-day billionaire Sanjay Mehrotra, whose family once didn’t have the financial means to send him to America, is now included in the same conversations as Donald Trump. He particularly stole the spotlight as the only Indian-origin tech executive in the US president’s China delegation in May. Having even attended a Trump-hosted Diwali celebration at the White House last year, Mehrotra has also received applause from the POTUS for his company’s and his own investment in US semiconductor manufacturing, earning the “fantastic CEO” tag.
Mehrotra continues to earn credit across numerous US headlines in association with the semiconductor industry and his ties to Donald Trump. However, there’s a huge possibility that many have forgotten his role in turning one of the most crucial intangible parts of human experience into not only something tangible but a serious money-making computing triumph we can’t imagine the world without: memory.
Fighting his way into the US after 3 visa rejection
Now 68 years old, the Micron CEO grew up in India until his late teens. Coming from a lower middle-class family, his father dreamt big and long envisioned him going to the US for higher studies.
By the time he hadn’t even turned 18, Sanjay Mehrotra had already gone to college in India with an aim to ultimately land admission to a US university. His first attempt at doing so failed as he had only finished high school (11 years of school) at the time; the next attempt, following his first year at college, got him into the University of California, Berkeley.
The round of rejections, however, wasn’t over yet. Despite some happy news being on his side, Mehrotra returned from the US embassy dejected after his visa application was rejected. A second attempt also went down the drain, until his father put his foot down and was determined to send him to the US. Authorities wouldn’t have it. His positive attitude kept barking up the wrong tree and ultimately left Mehrotra with three visa rejections by the US Consulate in New Delhi.
Time and again, Mehrotra has bared his heart in numerous interviews about how his father’s tenacity led him to make a case for his son studying in the US in a breathless 20-minute “performance of a lifetime” with the counsellor, who finally gave in and granted a young Sanjay the opportunity to go live the ‘American Dream’ after initially showing him the way out.
As fate would have it, Mehrotra landed at Berkeley, studied computer science and electrical engineering, and subsequently completed his master’s degree after transferring from the highly esteemed Indian university, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS).
Amidst it all, he discovered his love for designing chips and was hired by Intel while he was still in college. This was just the beginning of it all, for it was at Intel where Sanjay crossed paths with Eli Harari, yet another immigrant (from Israel) who’d come to the US to make it big.
Together, Mehrotra and Harari became two of the three founding pillars of SanDisk (originally SunDisk), a company with undeniable relevance even today given the ubiquity of its SD cards, from digital cameras to smartphones and more. Teaming up with Jack Yuan, who was from Taiwan, they laid the foundation for SunDisk in 1988 and spent years refining a new technology called flash memory, enabling data storage without any external power or moving parts.
Sanjay Mehrotra’s rise as a ‘Memory Pioneer’ at SanDisk
In a world where artificial intelligence is changing the way we view technology’s unprecedented levels of advancement, it may be hard to imagine a time when a palm-sized data storage card was a miracle in itself. Nonetheless, it was the same physical technology that pushed bulky hard disks out of the conversation.
Right before closing the chapter on the year 1994, Mehrotra, Harari and Yuan announced a new format for their flash memory products that could, from then on, easily fit into devices like phones and digital cameras.
The company called it CompactFlash (CF). The following year, the company rebranded itself and went public under the new name, SanDisk. A much smaller and still-famous successor of CF called the Secure Digital (SD) card came out in 1999, thanks to a collaboration between SanDisk, Panasonic and Toshiba, with the trio becoming the SD Association’s members in 2000.
If the tech world has taught us anything, it’s that pioneers also face downfalls at one point or another. Mehrotra’s SanDisk faced a similar fate in the early 2000s when the collapsing global economy forced them to realise that “being dependent on removable products was not good enough,” according to Business Insider.
Even though SanDisk was one of the few companies to take flash memory seriously at the time, SanDisk’s stock fell below $6 in November 2008, two years before Eli Harari retired and Mehrotra got promoted from COO to CEO. Around the same time, the company fended off an acquisition deal from Samsung.
With the leadership taking a stand for SanDisk, Mehrotra’s reign commencing in 2011 proved it was all worth it. The SD card creator made such a swift recovery that it went from nearly being acquired by Samsung in 2008 to actually swooping in and making its own first acquisition in 2011, a year into Sanjay Mehrotra sitting in the CEO chair.
The company’s hard-core belief in flash memory helped it acquire Pliant Technology in a $327 million cash deal, setting the tone for multiple acquisitions in the years to come. Mehrotra remained at the forefront of it all despite his other two co-founding partners having already thrown in the towel, with Jack Yuan semi-retiring in 2004 and Harari retiring in 2010.
According to StockAnalysis.com, SanDisk has a market capitalisation of $184.87 billion today, ten years after Mehrotra left his post as the CEO and spearheaded the $16 billion acquisition of the company by US hard-disk maker Western Digital Corp.
Leading Micron in AI’s era as a proud Indian-origin member of the billionaire club
Since leaving SanDisk behind, the Kanpur-born visionary’s ties to the semiconductor industry have only deepened, with AI’s boom working in his favour as a blessing in disguise.
With Micron recognising him as a pioneer behind the diversified and comprehensive portfolio of flash storage solutions and as someone who established key manufacturing operations in China, Taiwan, Japan and Malaysia, Sanjay’s run as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors began in May 2017.
Cut to 9 years later, the Idaho-based company that had long steered clear of making cutting-edge bets now has a $1 trillion valuation, joining the ranks of Asian rivals like Samsung and SK Hynix after settling for a little over $100 billion a year ago, according to Reuters. The same record-high surge promoted the tech veteran to the billionaire club in May 2026.
Forbes also confirms that Micron stock has jumped some 3000% since Mehrotra took over as CEO. Given the experienced Indian-origin executive’s ever-soaring trajectory, the business-focused media company even honoured him among a record 144 foreign-born American citizens from 45 countries now holding a quarter of the billionaire wealth in a country founded on successful immigrant stories.
With a net worth of $1.3 billion, Mehrotra sits at No. 129 on America’s Richest Immigrants 2026 list, which Forbes released in July. His presence therein helped India hold on to its top position as the birthplace of the most immigrant billionaires for the second consecutive year.
His personal net worth boost and Micron earning the title of a trillion-dollar titan were just the icing on the cake this year. The Idaho chipmaker’s boss repeatedly earned public praise from American President Donald Trump, owing to the company’s multi-billion-dollar investments in US semiconductor manufacturing.
Micron spent a massive $250 billion in July, vowing to produce 40% of its DRAM memory chips in the United States. That same month, the Micron president and CEO announced a $250 million investment in Trump Accounts, a tool created under Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ to give children below 18 years of age a real financial head start, foregrounding his commitment to philanthropy as well. The MAGA leader, who welcomed Mehrotra as the only Indian-origin executive into his high-profile business delegation to China merely months ago, touted the contribution as the “BIGGEST CORPORATE Investment of its kind” on social media.
Thank you @POTUS for your support. Micron is proud to be part of this historic initiative, which complements our over $200 billion investment in U.S. memory manufacturing and R&D, creating over 90,000 jobs across the country. https://t.co/emSep5nb5K
— Sanjay Mehrotra (@MicronCEO) July 1, 2026
It’s almost poetic how an Indian-born man who was repeatedly denied entry to the US is the same person who’s been endlessly getting pats on the back from the country’s president while other tech leaders continue to run circles around him, given Micron’s position as the only major US-based memory supplier.
Say what you may about the rise of artificial intelligence, but it has surely rewired the memory chip industry and the lives of those leading it. Mehrotra has continued to climb to all-time highs his father might have only imagined half a decade ago when he fought his way in with the US Consulate.
Mehrotra’s journey especially hits close to home for many middle-class Indians, who for time immemorial have wished to live the American Dream and pursue higher education in the US without a clear vision of how that ambitious dream would ultimately be funded.
Getting the first step in has always mattered the most. Mehrotra, who grew up in a home that didn’t even have a telephone, continues to uphold his family-first values, having seen first-hand how his own parents went the extra mile in helping him land where he is today – be it starting out his walk down the tech path at BITS Pilani, to planting his feet in the University of California Berkeley, or ultimately taking on the role of a “Memory Pioneer” at SanDisk and Micron, and all of America.
Disclaimer: This is an independent profile. While Micron’s representatives were contacted prior to this article’s publication, we did not receive a response. The profile was reported using publicly available records, sources and news reports where applicable. This content was produced in accordance with FinancialExpress.com’s editorial guidelines.