COMPANY RISK RATINGS
By InsidEntity Editorial Desk · Aug 17, 2026 · 5 min read
People search his pay package, his acquisitions, and his cybersecurity credentials. We look at the seats.
According to his InsidEntity profile, Nikesh Arora (born 9 February 1968) has been chairman and chief executive of Palo Alto Networks since June 2018. He concurrently holds two further public board seats.
The seats he holds
At Palo Alto Networks, Arora is chairman, CEO, and a member of the Corporate Development Committee: the committee that oversees the company’s own M&A activity, including the $25 billion CyberArk acquisition it closed in February 2026. Because the chair and CEO roles are combined, PANW’s governance guidelines require a Lead Independent Director to run executive sessions of the independent directors and report back to Arora directly. Arora himself holds no independent status here. He is the executive being overseen.
At Uber Technologies, Arora is classified as an independent director, seated on the Nominating & Governance Committee and the Compensation Committee since joining in May 2025.
At Compagnie Financière Richemont, he has been a non-executive director since 2017. In April 2025 he was elevated to Lead Independent Director and added to the Chairman’s Committee; in November 2025 he was named chair of a newly formed Strategic Security Committee, and he also sits on the Nominations Committee.
| Company | Role | On the record since |
|---|---|---|
| Palo Alto Networks | Chairman, CEO; Corporate Development Committee | June 2018 |
| Uber Technologies | Independent director; Nominating & Governance, Compensation | May 2025 |
| Compagnie Financière Richemont | Non-executive director; Lead Independent Director (Apr 2025); Chair, Strategic Security Committee (Nov 2025); Nominations Committee | 2017 |
The record before
The earlier chapters are on the profile too. At Deutsche Telekom AG, where his last role was Chief Marketing Officer of T-Mobile International, from 1999 to 2004, preceded by financial roles at Putnam Investments and Fidelity Investments. At Google, in various roles from 2004, becoming senior vice president and chief business officer in 2009, a position he held until 2014. As vice chair and CEO of SoftBank Internet & Media, then president and COO of SoftBank Group, from 2014 to 2016. And in non-executive or board roles, now concluded, at Bharti Airtel, Aviva, Sprint Corp., Colgate-Palmolive, Yahoo! Japan, HeadSpin (2018 to 2024), MoveWorks (2021 to 2024), and the nonprofit Tipping Point. He currently advises Auradyne and Glean Technologies. He holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi, an MBA from Northeastern, and a finance master’s from Boston College.
The governance lens
Three data points on the record do most of the talking.
The first is board count. Arora sits on three public-company boards at once, one of them as the executive he is meant to be overseen by. His appointment at Uber required a board-level exception to its numerical limit on outside directorships, with the Nominating & Governance Committee determining the overload did not impair his ability to serve.
The second is pay. Palo Alto Networks holds the most-rejected say-on-pay record in the S&P 500: shareholders have voted down Arora’s compensation package seven times since 2015, most recently in December 2025, when a package valued at just under $100 million failed to win majority support. Both ISS and Glass Lewis have recommended against it in most years on file, citing a target pay level roughly double that of Arora’s direct peers. The votes are advisory only; none of the seven has changed the outcome.
The third is the reciprocal role. At Richemont, Arora holds the Lead Independent Director seat, the position that exists specifically to check a chief executive who also chairs the board. At Palo Alto Networks, that same check is applied to Arora, by someone else. He sits on both sides of the Lead Independent Director dynamic. Furthermore, he is nine years into the Richemont seat as of 2026, approaching the ten-year mark at which the InsidEntity methodology stops counting any director as independent, regardless of formal classification.
Independence, read the InsidEntity way
The Director Independence pillar leans on direct disclosures from directors themselves through the platform’s director risk framework; where declarations have not been populated, the platform presents the filing-based default and says so.
Arora’s profile currently displays a Director Verified status of Pending Verification. Until a director completes the independence disclosure through our risk framework, the platform relies on statutory definitions. But a seat’s independence classification is only the starting point. Uber calls Arora independent; Richemont has made him the board’s senior independent voice; Palo Alto Networks does not call him independent at all, because he runs the company. All three can be correct on their own terms and still leave an investor without the full picture unless the seats are read together.
If you sit on a board, this record exists for you too
InsidEntity maintains director profiles across 145 stock exchanges, built from filings and public disclosures, whether or not the director has ever seen them. Verification is the part only you can add: completing the independence disclosure through the platform’s director risk framework moves your profile from the platform’s defaults to your own account of your independence, visible to every investor who looks you up before they form a view without you.
His full profile, directorships, committee history, and working record are free to view: Nikesh Arora on InsidEntity.
Know your entity. This is independent research, not financial advice.