NeoBytes :) The big question answered: how much sleep does Microsoft's CEO get every night?

NeoBytes :) is an occasional feature that takes a step back from the big headlines, to take a look at what else is happening in the vast, scary expanse of the tech world - often with a cynical eye, always with a dose of humour.

What will the iPhone 7 look like? Will the Surface mini ever go on sale? How on earth is Blackberry still alive? Even these monumentally important questions pale into insignificance alongside one of the greatest mysteries of the tech industry: just how much sleep does Satya Nadella get?

Now, finally, the answer to that question has been uncovered. In a hard-hitting interview with ABC News, Microsoft's chief executive said that he typically gets a very decent eight hours of sleep every night, and usually wakes up at around 7am. Thanks to info compiled from various sources by Business Insider, we can examine that figure in the context of two other CEOs in the tech sector.

As the extremely impressive and highly informative graphic above shows, Nadella is way ahead of both Marissa Meyer (CEO of Yahoo) and Jack Dorsey (CEO of Square, and co-founder of Twitter), who both say they get around 4-6 hours of sleep a night. Shocking.

In the interview, Nadella also disclosed that he enjoys cooking, especially an Indian dish known as Hyderabadi biryani.

Of course, let's face it, Nadella's cooking and sleeping patterns aren't quite the biggest issues in tech, but for a bit of fun, we thought we'd dig around to see if we could find out how his sleep compares with that of his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.

As it turns out, Ballmer was asked the question of how much he sleeps every night at Microsoft's MVP Summit back in 2008. "I sleep good," he replied, real good... I get 7 to 8 hours of sleep every night." So, about the same as the company's current CEO then.

But the end of Ballmer's answer is interesting, if only because it gives us a further insight into the thinking of the man that ran Microsoft for 14 years: "I think you have to have enough confidence that you're going to be able to do a good job 16 hours a day that you can frankly sleep well the other eight hours a night."

Say what you like about Ballmer, but he sure had confidence. No wonder he slept like a baby.

Now, I wonder what he has for breakfast...