Oracle’s inventory is rising sharply, and CEO Safra Catz’s net worth is rising sharply.
The 63-year-old tech executive has increased her personal wealth by about $412 million in her first six-hour trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, according to Forbes estimates. This jump is tied to the stock price of the software giant. This rose about 40% after Tuesday afternoon’s report showed a massive $455 billion of $455 billion in remaining performance obligations.
According to Forbes, Catz’s estimated net worth is $3.4 billion as of Wednesday afternoon. It’s up from the first $3 billion of the day. Oracle’s equity performance has further benefited the net worth of co-founder Larry Ellison. He is currently estimated to be the second-bundance person in the world with a net worth of between $293 billion and $386.3 billion on Wednesday morning.
“We got off to an incredible start to the year as Oracle has become a go-to place for AI workloads,” Catz said in Oracle’s revenue call on Tuesday. Oracle’s growth forecast comes from the rapidly growing cloud infrastructure business, and the deal that has been contracted with several large artificial intelligence companies has “signed a critical cloud agreement with AI’s WHO WHO, including Openai, Xai, Meta, Nvidia, AMD and more.”
She became co-CEO at Oracle when Ellison stepped down from the role in 2014, and was the company’s only CEO since the death of her co-leader, Mark Heard in 2019.
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Cats was born in Israel and her family moved to Brookline, Massachusetts when she was six years old. She graduated from Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and later earned a law degree.
She worked as an investment banker on Wall Street for over a decade before joining Oracle in 1999 as Senior Vice President. She quickly climbed the ladder, joined the company’s board of directors in 2000 and became president in 2004.
Prior to the appointment of CEO, Catz acquired dozens of companies during his tenure and led an aggressive merger and acquisition team that helped drive Oracle’s growth. She has acquired pilots for fierce software rivals like PeopleSoft (acquired for $10.3 billion in 2004) and Sun Microsystems ($7.4 billion in 2009), navigating major anti-trust hurdles to close both deals.
During his tenure as CEO of Oracle, dating back to 2014, the company’s share price rose more than 800%. Catz has recently been ranked one of the highest-paid US CEOs for 2022. In 2024, she won nearly $6.5 million in total compensation, according to a government submission by Oracle.
Outside of Oracle, the Cats have been active in national politics for the past decade, joining President Donald Trump’s transition team in 2016, ahead of his first term. She is currently on the Homeland Security Advisory Committee along with fellow CEOs such as Maryborough of General Motors, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Hamdiurkaya of Chobani, and Mark Andresen, co-founder of Andresen Horowitz.
According to Forbes rankings, in June, the Cats were the 40th most abundant homemade woman in the world.
Some Wall Street analysts, including Bank of America, predict that Oracle’s stock price could continue to climb based on the company’s revenue growth forecast. In a revenue call Tuesday, Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick said he and other Wall Street analysts were “shocked in a very good way” after seeing Oracle’s report. John Diffucci of Guggenheim Securities said he was “blowed away.”
In a statement Tuesday, the Cats promoted Oracle’s “amazing quarter” while pledging a multi-billion dollar cloud agreement over the coming months.
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