Oracle Corporation
Leadership History
4 leaders · 1977 to present
Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia is the CEO of Oracle, in the role since 2025. The first chief executive was Safra Catz, from 2014.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clay Magouyrk | Co-Chief Executive Officer | 2025 | Present | 1 |
| Mike Sicilia | Co-Chief Executive Officer | 2025 | Present | 1 |
| Safra Catz | Executive Vice Chair (CEO 2014-2025) | 2014 | 2025 | 11 |
| Larry Ellison | Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer | 1977 | Present | 49 |
Oracle is best known for Oracle Database, the relational database behind many bank, airline, telecom and government systems. Over four decades it added middleware (BEA), applications (PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hyperion, NetSuite), Java and hardware (Sun Microsystems) and healthcare records (Cerner). The company moved its headquarters from Redwood Shores, California to Austin, Texas in December 2020. Since 2023 its identity has shifted again, toward Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a landlord for AI model training. Oracle was founded in June 1977 in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates as Software Development Laboratories (SDL) to commercialize the relational database (RDBMS), evolving over five decades into a global enterprise cloud and software titan headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Oracle sells to businesses and governments, not consumers. Its largest revenue line is cloud services and license support: customers pay recurring fees for OCI compute, storage, GPUs and database services, for Fusion Cloud ERP, HCM, SCM and NetSuite subscriptions, and for annual support on licensed Oracle Database and middleware. Smaller lines are new cloud and on-premise licenses (Q1 FY2027 software revenue was $5.5 billion, down 3% as customers migrate to cloud), services ($1.4 billion in Q1 FY2027) and hardware ($0.8 billion). OCI is now the growth engine: in Q1 FY2027 infrastructure revenue was $7.4 billion against $4.2 billion for cloud applications.
Co-Chief Executive Officer
2025 – Present
1 year (current)
Previously president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where he led the OCI build-out from its early engineering team. Named co-CEO on September 22, 2025 with responsibility tied to Oracle's AI infrastructure expansion.
Co-Chief Executive Officer
2025 – Present
1 year (current)
Sicilia orchestrated the highly complex, massive $28 billion acquisition of Cerner, aggressively attempting to modernize the notoriously terrible electronic health records (EHR) software used in global hospitals.
As Executive Vice President of Global Industries, he manages Oracle's massive push into highly specialized vertical software markets, particularly focusing on healthcare and telecommunications.
Executive Vice Chair (CEO 2014-2025)
2014 – 2025
11 years
Oversaw the NetSuite and Cerner acquisitions, the 2020 move to Austin, and the early OCI capacity contracts with AI companies.
Served as co-CEO from 2014 and sole CEO from 2019 until September 2025, when she became executive vice chair of the board.
Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer
1977 – Present
49 years (current)
Ellison made the absolutely brilliant, highly aggressive strategic decision to completely rebuild Oracle's cloud infrastructure from scratch (OCI Gen 2), effectively saving the company from being completely destroyed by Amazon AWS.
As the legendary Founder and CTO, he maintains absolute, tyrannical control over the company's strategic direction, fiercely driving its massive pivot toward cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
These officers report to the chief executive and are not part of the CEO timeline above.
The main risk is financing. Oracle spent $55.7 billion on capital expenditures in FY2026, versus $21.2 billion a year earlier, and free cash flow was negative $5 billion in Q1 FY2027. It planned to raise $45-50 billion of debt and equity in 2026 and sold $20 billion of stock through an ATM program in Q1 FY2027. A large share of the $664 billion backlog depends on a few AI customers, above all OpenAI, so their ability to pay matters. Oracle cut about 21,000 jobs in FY2026, and the share price fell from a 52-week high of $322.54 to roughly $138 by late September 2026. Oracle Health still faces customer and government scrutiny over the federal VA records rollout.
Lawrence J. 'Larry' Ellison is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Oracle Corporation. Born in New York City in 1944 and raised in Chicago, Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 with $1,200 of personal capital, serving as CEO for 37 years (1977-2014) and building it into a global technology empire while becoming one of the wealthiest individuals in human history.
Safra A. Catz was Chief Executive Officer of Oracle Corporation from 2014 (co-CEO with Mark Hurd until 2019) until September 2025, when Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia took over as co-CEOs and she became executive vice chair. A former investment banker at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Catz joined Oracle in 1999, served as President and CFO, and was appointed CEO in 2014; she has been the master architect behind Oracle's disciplined M&A execution, operational margin expansion, and multi-cloud transformation.
Mark Hurd served as President and Co-CEO of Oracle alongside Safra Catz from 2010 until his passing in October 2019; Hurd brought well-known enterprise sales execution from HP and NCR, scaling Oracle's direct sales force and driving the early multi-billion-dollar transition to Fusion Cloud applications.
Bob Miner was Oracle's effective founding master programmer who architected the core relational database engine, serving as head of software engineering until his passing in 1994, while Ed Oates wrote the initial database software routines and operating system interfaces before retiring in 1994.
Recognizing that first-generation clouds (like early AWS) suffered from shared virtual network bottlenecks, Larry Ellison recruited top cloud architects to build OCI Gen 2 from scratch, isolating control planes, building non-blocking RoCE networks, and creating the premier infrastructure for AI supercomputing.
Clay Magouyrk serves as President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), leading global cloud engineering, hardware architecture, AI supercluster deployments, and datacenter operations.
Mike Sicilia serves as Executive Vice President of Oracle Health and Global Industries, leading the technological modernization of Cerner EHR, cloud healthcare platforms, and specialized vertical enterprise suites.
Larry Ellison is a signatory of The Giving Pledge, donating billions of dollars to biomedical research, cancer treatment, healthcare technology, and wildlife conservation through the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) in Los Angeles and Oxford.
Compare executive leadership tenures and strategic transitions
Explore Oracle
Core profile pages, founders and related research hubs for this company.