#358,081 Most Popular
About
Egyptian entrepreneur, software engineer, author, podcaster and public speaker known for serving as chief business officer of Google X along with writing the international bestseller Solve for Happy and founding the One Billion Happy movement. He is also known for his Instagram and TikTok videos about happiness, relationships, grief, artificial intelligence, and personal development.
Before fame
He earned a civil engineering degree from Ain Shams University in 1990 and completed an MBA at Maastricht School of Management. He began his technology career as a systems engineer for IBM Egypt. He then worked for NCR and spent around seven years at Microsoft before joining Google in 2007.
Trivia
He published Solve for Happy in 2017, Scary Smart in 2021 and That Little Voice in Your Head in 2022. He co-wrote the 2024 book Unstressable with stress-management specialist Alice Law. He launched Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat in April 2020 and has produced more than 300 episodes.
Family life
He was born in Egypt to a civil engineer father and an English professor mother. He met his former wife Nibal while attending university. His daughter is named Aya. His son Ali died following complications from an appendectomy in 2014 which inspired him to write Solve for Happy and begin his One Billion Happy mission.
Associated with
He has made multiple appearances on The Diary of a CEO hosted by Steven Bartlett and eventually became chief AI officer of Bartlett's company FlightStory.
