To take Ellison’s place, the board promoted two officials, Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, to the position of CEO. Catz will handle manufacturing, financial and legal matters, and Hurd will handle sales, service and “vertical industry global business units,” according to a press release.
Though a company having two CEOs is uncommon, Ellison noted that he and the new CEOs have been working well together for the past several years and would like to keep things that way for “the foreseeable future.”
Ellison, who co-founded Oracle in 1977 and is now 70 years old, has a net worth of $49.7 billion. In March, research firm Gartner reported that Oracle moved past IBM to take the No. 2 position for worldwide software revenue, under Microsoft.
