Oracle’s stock is surging, and so is CEO Safra Catz’s net worth.
The 63-year-old tech executive saw her personal wealth increase by roughly $412 million in the New York Stock Exchange’s first six hours of trading on Wednesday, according to a Forbes estimate. The jump is tied to the software giant’s stock price, which has soared by roughly 40% after the company’s Tuesday afternoon report showed a massive $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized.
Catz’s estimated net worth is now $3.4 billion, as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Forbes — up from $3 billion at the start of the day. Oracle’s stock performance has benefited co-founder Larry Ellison’s net worth even more: He’s now estimated to be the second-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $386.3 billion, up from $293 billion on Wednesday morning.
“Clearly, we had an amazing start to the year because Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads,” Catz said on Oracle’s Tuesday earnings call. Oracle’s growth projections come from a fast-growing cloud infrastructure business, and deals signed with several large artificial intelligence companies, she said: “We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD, and many others.”
She became a co-CEO at Oracle in 2014 when Ellison stepped down from the role, and has been the company’s sole CEO since the death of her co-lead, Mark Hurd, in 2019. Under Catz’s leadership, Oracle’s stock is reaching record levels and a type of surge it hasn’t seen since the 1999 tech boom, CNBC reported.
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Catz was born in Israel, and her family moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, when she was 6 years old, according to Time. She graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, where she later earned a law degree.
She spent more than a decade working on Wall Street as an investment banker, and joined Oracle as a senior vice president in 1999. She quickly climbed the ladder, joining the company’s board of directors in 2000 and becoming its president in 2004.
Before her CEO appointment, Catz led an aggressive mergers and acquisitions team that acquired dozens of companies during her tenure and helped propel Oracle’s growth. She’s credited with steering acquisitions of fierce software rivals like PeopleSoft (acquired for $10.3 billion in 2004) and Sun Microsystems ($7.4 billion in 2009), navigating major antitrust hurdles to complete both deals.
During her tenure as Oracle’s CEO, dating back to 2014, the company’s stock price has increased by more than 800%. Catz ranked as one of the highest-paid U.S. CEOs as recently as 2022, when she earned $138 million in total compensation, the bulk of it in the form of stock options. In 2024, she earned nearly $6.5 million in total compensation, according to government filings by Oracle.
Outside of Oracle, Catz has been active in national politics over the past decade, joining U.S. President Donald Trump’s transition team in 2016 ahead of his first term in office. She currently serves on the Homeland Security Advisory Council alongside fellow CEOs like General Motors’ Mary Barra, Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan and Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, along with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen.
In June, Catz was the 40th-richest self-made woman in the world, according to a Forbes ranking.
Some Wall Street analysts, including at Bank of America, predict that Oracle’s stock price could continue climbing based on the company’s revenue growth projections. On Tuesday’s earnings call, analyst Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said he and other Wall Street analysts were “in shock, in a very good way,” from viewing Oracle’s report. John DiFucci of Guggenheim Securities said he was “blown away.”
Catz touted Oracle’s “astonishing quarter” while promising more multibillion-dollar cloud pacts in the coming months, in a statement on Tuesday.
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