MASON MORFIT

Morfit joined ValueAct Capital in 2001, near the firm's founding, after working in equity research at Credit Suisse First Boston covering the managed care and health insurance industry. He spent 19 years as ValueAct's President and Chief Investment Officer before becoming CEO in January 2020, then Co-CEO by 2023.

Under his leadership the San Francisco firm manages more than $14 billion. His signature move was Microsoft.

ValueAct took a stake in 2013, and Morfit joined the board in 2014 as the company shifted from a fading Windows story to a cloud powerhouse under new CEO Satya Nadella. He served on Microsoft's board until 2017 and later sat on the board of Salesforce after ValueAct invested there in 2022.

ValueAct Capital

Morfit runs concentrated, long-term bets on a small number of companies he believes are misunderstood. Instead of demanding quick fixes like buybacks, he tries to earn a board seat and then work shoulder to shoulder with management for years.

He draws a sharp line between transactional activism, which is fast and financial, and his preferred transformational activism, which is slow and operational. The idea is that when a company genuinely changes for the better, investors win twice, once from better results and again from the market re-rating the stock higher.

He deliberately avoids public shaming, because he believes berating a CEO just makes them defensive.

Microsoft. ValueAct built a stake in 2013 when the market saw Microsoft as a dying PC company, and Morfit argued it was worth far more than that.

He joined the board in 2014 just as Satya Nadella pivoted the company to cloud computing. Microsoft's value multiplied enormously over the following years, and ValueAct's early, patient position looked prophetic.

It became the textbook case for his transformational-activism idea, that quiet partnership with the right management can unlock staggering value without a public fight.

The quiet approach has a cost. By avoiding public brawls and working slowly from inside boardrooms, Morfit can spend years on a position before the payoff shows up, and some bets simply take longer or deliver less than the Microsoft home run.

ValueAct's more cyclical and industrial holdings have at times lagged, a reminder that betting on a corporate transformation means betting the management team will actually pull it off. When trust in a leadership team is misplaced, the slow style can turn into dead money.

Morfit believes the deepest value comes from working with great leaders over years, not from financial engineering. He argues that transactional ideas can be dreamed up from the outside, but transformational ones can only happen from the inside, with deep engagement and real trust.

He wants to give CEOs a safe space to pivot rather than a public beating. His core bet is that patience plus a genuine partnership with management beats the quick-hit activist playbook over the long run.

Morfit married actress Jordana Brewster in September 2022 in Redondo Beach, California. He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1976.

He is otherwise private about his personal life.

Morfit attended Sidwell Friends School and earned a B.A. in Political Economy from Princeton University.

That grounding in economics and institutions, rather than pure finance, shaped his focus on how companies are actually governed and run.