- Oracle’s breakout year shot the net worth of Larry Ellison to over $350 billion, making him neck and neck with Elon Musk for the world’s richest person. But it’s also soaring the pocketbook of the tech firm’s CEO, Safra Catz—who is now worth some $3.4 billion. She credits Oracle’s success to landing deals with the “who’s who of AI” such as OpenAI and Meta.
2025 might just be the year of Oracle.
The 48-year-old tech company’s stock value has doubled year-to-date, and just in the last week, soared by over 30% off the heels of a bullish earnings report. Oracle’s market cap is now valued over $920 billion—higher than that of Walmart and JPMorgan Chase.
This substantial stock performance has boosted the wealth of Oracle’s investors, namely Larry Ellison. As the company’s founder, chairman, and chief technology officer, his wealth has grown to over $350 billion, putting him neck-and-neck with Elon Musk as the world’s richest person.
But it’s not just Ellison who’s been owed all the credit—or the award. Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz has been at the helm of the company for over a decade, and her wealth jumped by over $400 million in just six hours on Wednesday to $3.4 billion, according to Forbes.
“Clearly, we had an amazing start to the year because Oracle has become the go-to place for AI workloads,” Catz said during Tuesday’s earnings call. “We have signed significant cloud contracts with the who’s who of AI, including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD and many others.”
Catz’s leadership successes at Oracle have cemented her as one of the richest self-made women in the world, having climbed the ladder first on Wall Street as an investment banker before heading to Silicon Valley to join Oracle (the tech firm later moved to Austin in 2020). And part of what has helped drive the tech company to succeed is her mantra to always be the best.
“We don’t want to follow others. We always try to do something differently,” she told CNBC earlier this year.
“Being No. 1 is very, very important. It also means you’re the best and solving customers’ needs.
How Catz and Ellison have grown Oracle by 450%—and their wealth along with it
On the surface level, Oracle’s recent stock success is somewhat head-scratching. The company has been around for over four decades, and other big-name tech companies, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon, have made the cloud services market more crowded than ever.
Moreover, during Tuesday’s earnings report, Oracle announced it actually had slightly missed earnings and revenue projections.
However, investors have been more impressed with what Oracle has coming down the pipeline, namely its plan to 14x its cloud infrastructure revenue. By fiscal year 2030, its cloud infrastructure revenue will be $144 billion—up from fiscal year 2025’s $10.3 billion. Just this week, OpenAI signed a $300 billion cloud contract with Oracle for the construction of data centers over the next five years, according to The New York Times.
As the roughly 41% stakeholder in Oracle, Ellison has reaped the greatest benefits from his tech company’s 450% share price growth over the last five years. The 81-year-old also has gained substantial wealth from previous involvement in Tesla, as well as now owning close to 50% in Paramount Skydance.
Catz too owes her billionaire status to Oracle. Although her base salary is $950,000, the majority of her wealth is connected to the market. She maintains about 1.1 million in shares but regularly receives and exercises stock options; earlier this year, she sold stock options worth some $1.8 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Fortune reached out to Oracle for comment.
Catz’s advice: leaders need to ask tougher questions
Catz is a double graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, having gone to law school shortly after graduating with a business-focused bachelor’s degree. And even though she ultimately decided to forgo a career in law, she has no regrets.
“My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning,” she told Time in 2010. “That ultimately brought me to Oracle.”
And as a leader, one of her core principles is always keeping an open mind.
“Listen, think and don’t be afraid to change your position based on new facts,” she told Fortune in 2015 after being asked the biggest leadership lesson she’d learned over the past year.
The then-newly minted co-CEO of Oracle added that employees deserve to be heard out in every meeting.
“If something doesn’t make sense, give them the respect of asking tough questions,” she said. “Think about what you’ve been told because if it doesn’t make sense to you, then it may not make sense at all. But, then again, they just might be right.”
