Safra Catz: The Quiet Israeli-American Power Broker Running the World’s Cloud (and Maybe Your Taxes)

Safra Catz, two syllables that sound like a Bond villain’s accountant, has quietly become the planet’s most powerful Israeli-born woman who doesn’t run a country. Instead, she runs Oracle, the Redwood City behemoth whose cloud contracts determine whether your local tax authority can process your return before the next ice age. From São Paulo tramways to Jakarta’s port authority, Catz’s spreadsheets decide which governments can modernize and which will keep citizens licking glue on paper forms until 2050. Global relevance? Only if you enjoy paying for civilization.

Born in Holon when Israel still measured prosperity in citrus crates, Catz emigrated to the United States at six, a timing that allowed her to collect both an American accent and an IDF file thick enough to keep conspiracy theorists employed. She then marched through Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania Law—institutions that specialize in minting international technocrats who can price your soul in basis points. By 1999 she’d landed at Oracle, a company whose corporate culture then resembled a Roman galley staffed entirely by sales reps with expense accounts.

Globalization, that splendid euphemism for shipping middle-class anxiety offshore, handed Catz the oars. Oracle’s databases undergird everything from European vaccine passports to Tokyo’s bullet-train ticketing—systems that crash only when democracy itself feels like a rounding error. When Larry Ellison decided he’d rather chase islands and TikTok deals, Catz and the late Mark Hurd were named co-CEOs in 2014, a power-sharing arrangement as stable as a two-headed mule. After Hurd’s death in 2019, she became sole CEO, proving that in Silicon Valley the glass ceiling is reinforced with Kevlar and stock options.

Under Catz’s watch, Oracle’s cloud has become the world’s most profitable geopolitical Rorschach test. NATO stores intel on Oracle servers; so does the Saudi interior ministry that once organized weekend seminars on bone-saw etiquette. In 2022 she inked a deal to run TikTok’s U.S. data—because nothing says “digital sovereignty” like parking teenagers’ dance videos next to Fort Knox firewalls. Meanwhile, European regulators scratch their heads wondering whether Oracle’s cloud qualifies as a monopoly or merely the inevitable heat death of competition.

The woman herself appears allergic to the TED-talk evangelism that passes for leadership these days. She speaks in the rapid, clipped cadence of someone who has already calculated the exact second you will stop being useful. Employees describe her memory as “transactional eidetic”: she can recall the margin on a 2003 Peruvian license deal but forgets birthdays, including, some say, her own. This makes her either a high-functioning sociopath or the closest thing capitalism has to an operating system. Either way, investors adore her; Oracle’s stock has quadrupled under her tenure, proving once again that the market rewards the absence of messy human emotion.

Internationally, Catz’s influence now transcends software. She sits on the board of Walt Disney, ensuring that the next Marvel villain will probably be an open-source database. She advised the Trump administration on tech policy between 2016 and 2020, a gig that required smiling politely while elected officials asked if Oracle could “make the cyber bigger.” And in 2023 she quietly lobbied against EU rules that would force cloud providers to share data with smaller rivals, arguing—without visible irony—that such obligations would stifle innovation. Somewhere in Brussels, a civil servant Googled the definition of chutzpah on an Oracle-hosted server.

What does it mean for the rest of us? Simply that the global south’s digital infrastructure is increasingly rented from a woman who once negotiated an acquisition during childbirth. (Yes, really. The deal closed before the epidural.) As governments from Lagos to Lahore outsource their bureaucratic souls to Oracle’s cloud, sovereignty becomes a monthly subscription service—cancel anytime, lose your border crossings. Meanwhile, Catz collects air miles and keeps her passport in a locked drawer, presumably next to a laminated contingency plan for every geopolitical scenario short of actual asteroid impact.

So here we are: a planet where one Israeli-American CFO-turned-CEO can reroute your tax dollars with a few keystrokes, yet still can’t get decent hummus at SFO. The joke, if you like your humor dark and algorithmically optimized, is that we all live on Safra Catz’s servers now; we just haven’t read the terms and conditions. And unlike her famously impatient negotiating style, the renewal notice is never early—it simply appears, quietly, on the last page of your digital life, written in the only language the cloud truly speaks: auto-renew.