Adena Friedman

Adena T. Friedman (born Adena Robinson Testa; 1969) is an American businesswoman. She currently serves as the president and CEO of Nasdaq, Inc. She was formerly a managing director and CFO of the Carlyle Group. Initially joining Nasdaq in 1993, she returned to Nasdaq from Carlyle in May 2014 as President of Global Corporate and information technology solutions. She was named the CEO of Nasdaq in January 2017, the first woman to lead a global exchange.

Forbes has repeatedly listed Friedman as one of the world's most powerful women on their annual Power Women list. She was ranked 55th on Fortune 's list of Most Powerful Women in 2023.

Early life and education Born Adena Robinson Testa and raised in metropolitan Baltimore, she is the daughter of Michael D. Testa, a managing director at T. Rowe Price, and Adena W. Testa, an attorney in the Baltimore law firm of Stewart, Plant & Blumenthal.

She left Nasdaq in 2011 to join private investment firm Carlyle Group as Chief Financial Officer and managing director, a position she held until 2014.

Friedman returned to Nasdaq as president and Chief Operating Officer. She became CEO in January 2017, replacing Robert Greifeld. She also participated in The Economist magazine The World in 2020 issue with a column titled "Ideas for modernizing capitalism,” predicting that “the fight for the soul of the global economy will heat up.”

During the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, Friedman was featured on The New York Times Corner Office "Logged On From the Laundry Room: How the C.E.O.s of Google, Pfizer and Slack Work From Home" article, sharing perspectives of company CEOs working from home due to the pandemic. She shared her decision to split key personnel at the exchange to two teams to ensure work continuity and described her work from home routine during the crisis. The story included Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, among others.

Beginning in December 2020, Friedman has led the Nasdaq to implement requirements that all companies listed on the index disclose standardized diversity statistics about their corporate boards. The initiative was struck down by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit four years later, which ruled that the US Securities and Exchange Commission had exceeded its statutory authority in approving these requirements, leading Nasdaq to withdraw the rule.

In 2023, she was appointed chair of the board of directors of Nasdaq. That year, Friedman's total compensation from Nasdaq, Inc. was $18.5 million, representing a CEO-to-median worker pay ratio of 157-to-1. Friedman was honored by American Banker as one of The Most Powerful Women in Banking for 2024.

Boards Friedman has served as a Class B director to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since December 2018, the only Exchange CEO to ever have done this.

Recognitions

In 2024, Friedman was ranked 46th on Forbes’ list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women.

In 2023 and 2025, Adena Friedman was named one of Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance. Personal life In 1993, she married Michael Cameron Friedman in a Presbyterian ceremony in Baltimore, Maryland. They have two sons. They live in Maryland.