Safra Catz

Safra Catz was born in 1961 in Holon, Israel, and immigrated to the United States at age six. She grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, earned a bachelor's degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She began her career as an investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where she specialized in technology company deals. Catz joined Oracle in 1999 and quickly became Larry Ellison's most trusted lieutenant. She was named co-CEO alongside Mark Hurd in 2014 and became sole CEO after Hurd's death in 2019. During her tenure, she orchestrated Oracle's massive acquisition strategy — over 130 deals including PeopleSoft ($10.3B), BEA Systems ($8.5B), Sun Microsystems ($7.4B), NetSuite ($9.3B), and Cerner ($28.3B). Each acquisition was executed with ruthless cost discipline, extracting maximum synergies through layoffs and integration. Under Catz's operational leadership, Oracle has pivoted from its legacy database and middleware businesses to become a major cloud infrastructure provider. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has emerged as a preferred platform for AI workloads, landing landmark deals with companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA for GPU cloud capacity. Oracle's revenue has surpassed $50 billion annually, with cloud services becoming the fastest-growing segment. Catz is known for her intense, no-nonsense management style. She is deeply involved in deal negotiations, financial planning, and operational execution. She runs Oracle with exceptional cost control while making bold capital allocation decisions. She is one of the highest-paid female executives in the world and one of the few women to lead a major enterprise technology company.