Safra Catz

When Safra Catz joined Oracle in 1999, she was an outsider.

An investment banker with no tech background.

Within two years, she was on the board.

By 2004, she was co-president.

Her defining moment came in 2005, when she spearheaded Oracle’s $10.3 billion hostile takeover of PeopleSoft.

The deal was brutal… 18 months of legal battles, shareholder fights, and executive shakeups.

But she won.

It set the stage for Oracle’s future: aggressive acquisitions that helped the company dominate enterprise software.

Over the next two decades, Catz led more than 130 acquisitions, including:
- BEA Systems ($8.5B) – expanded Oracle’s middleware portfolio
- Sun Microsystems ($7.4B) – brought Java and MySQL under Oracle’s control
- NetSuite ($9.3B) – strengthened Oracle’s cloud offerings

When Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO in 2014, he split the role between Catz and Mark Hurd.

After Hurd’s passing in 2019, she became sole CEO, overseeing Oracle’s cloud transformation and AI push.

Her strategy? Ruthless efficiency.

She slashed costs, restructured teams, and pushed Oracle to compete directly with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing.

Her reward? A $138M paycheck in 2022, making her one of the highest-paid executives in the U.S.

She rarely gives interviews.

She avoids the press.

But behind closed doors, she’s known as one of the toughest dealmakers in Silicon Valley.