Oracle Founder Larry Ellison Cancels Plan to Sell $7.5 Billion in Shares
Oracle founder Larry Ellison canceled a plan to sell 50 million shares worth $7.5 billion. The move comes as the software giant aggressively expands its AI infrastructure.
Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle, has canceled a plan that would have allowed him to sell up to 50 million shares of the software giant, valued at approximately $7.5 billion at the current stock price. Oracle announced on Saturday evening that no shares were sold under the plan and that Ellison has no other plans to sell company shares. The company did not disclose the reason for the cancellation, according to Reuters.
The announcement comes just a day after the sales plan was revealed, which was highly unusual for Ellison. According to a regulatory filing, he adopted the plan on June 22 and it was set to remain in effect until October 24. The plan allowed him to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares. This is an exceptional sales volume for Ellison, who holds more than 40% of Oracle shares, which he founded in 1977. Even if he had fully executed the planned sale, he would have remained with about 1.1 billion shares of the company. Since the beginning of the 21st century, according to CNBC, Ellison has never sold more than 25,000 Oracle shares at once.
The cancellation comes at a sensitive time for Oracle, which is in the midst of an aggressive expansion of its cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence operations. In February, the company announced it expects to raise between $45 billion and $50 billion during 2026 through a combination of debt and equity to increase cloud infrastructure capacity and meet demand from customers including AMD, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, TikTok, and xAI. Oracle also stated that in the current fiscal year it plans to raise about $40 billion through debt and equity, including a $20 billion share sale already completed in the first quarter. At the same time, the company reported that its reorganization costs, which also include employee layoffs, are expected to grow by about $700 million.
Oracle shares surged by 7.8% at one point on Friday after the company reported an addition of $26 billion to its remaining performance obligations, a figure that helped alleviate some concerns surrounding the scale of expenditures and debt. The trend later reversed and the stock ended trading down by about 2%, after analysts warned that a significant recovery in cash flow is still far off. Oracle is benefiting from the surge in demand for AI infrastructure, and in its latest reports reported a 121% annual increase in cloud infrastructure revenues. However, heavy investments in the field and associated debts continue to weigh on the stock, which has lost about 20% since the beginning of 2026. The company also laid off about 21,000 employees this year. Ellison, 82, ranks among the richest people in the world, with a fortune estimated at about $190 billion. In 2025, he also helped finance the merger between Skydance Media, controlled by his son David Ellison, and Paramount.
