A lecture by Safra Catz, CEO of the American software company Oracle, at the Technical University (TU) was disrupted by pro-Palestinian activists on Thursday.
Catz, who is in Munich for the security conference, was a guest of the TU’s “Speakers Series”, which students have been organizing on their own for many years. Bill Gates, Georges Soros and Kofi Annan, among others, have previously spoken in the series.
At the event early on Thursday evening in the packed auditorium of the TU, around ten activists interrupted the speaker right at the beginning, shouted pro-Palestinian slogans and distributed leaflets. The security service pushed the troublemakers out of the hall, and the police who were called in took three reports of bodily harm and damage to property. The TU, in the person of its press spokesman Ulrich Meyer, announced that it had no plans to take criminal action against the disruptors, for example for trespassing. After the interruption, the event continued and ended as planned. Safra Catz reported on her experiences as a woman in the managerial world.
The 62-year-old Catz has been CEO, i.e. chairwoman, of the software company Oracle, for which she has worked since 1999, since 2019. She was born in Israel to Jewish parents and moved to the United States with her family at the age of six. In addition to her work at Oracle, she has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company since 2017.
Oracle Corporation is based in the American state of Texas, in the city of Austin. It employs around 164,000 people worldwide and generates annual sales of around $50 billion. The company’s German headquarters are in Munich, on Riesstrasse in Moosach. Around 1,700 people work for Oracle in Germany.