Vicki Brady

Vicki Brady is the first female CEO of Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company, a position she's held since 2022; she was previously CFO and earlier worked at Singtel-owned Optus before joining Telstra in 2016. Her first year of the "Connected Future 30" strategy led to a 2.4 billion Australian dollar ($1.7 billion) profit, a bigger dividend and a fresh 1 billion Australian dollar ($696 million) buyback. But a July nationwide outage disrupted Triple Zero emergency calls; this prompted more than 30,000 customers to receive compensation and cost Brady 607,000 Australian dollars ($423,000) in short-term bonus pay.