Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and C.E.O. of Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world, is curious, empathetic, and, if not exactly humble, a master of the humblebrag. His superpower is his humanity. A sixty-three-year-old Englishman, who was knighted in 2016 for his contributions to the music industry and has topped Billboard’s Power 100 list of music-industry players several times in the past decade, Grainge is compact and a bit chubby, with alert eyes behind owlish glasses. He isn’t trying to be noticed. He presides over a public company worth more than fifty billion dollars, but he could be a small-business owner who sells music in a London shop, as did his father, Cecil. On earnings calls, Grainge can sound more like a London taxi dispatcher than a chief executive. But woe to those who mistake his European civility for a lack of competitive fire. “He is so deceptive with that little kind face and those little glasses,” Doug Morris, the previous chairman of UMG, told the Financial Times in 2003, when he was still Grainge’s boss. “Behind them, he is actually a killer shark.” In 2011, Grainge devoured Morris’s job.
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