Billionaire Larry Ellison cancels his plan to sell $7.5 billion of Oracle stock

Larry Ellison has cancelled the trading plan that would have let him sell up to $7.5 billion of Oracle stock, the company said on Saturday, Sept. 12.

Oracle's statement was three sentences long. Ellison, its executive chair and chief technology officer, has cancelled his 10b5-1 plan. No Oracle stock was sold under it. He has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock.

The plan was adopted in late June and would have run to Oct. 24, covering as many as 50 million shares. The Financial Times reported its existence this week, and Oracle's own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed it. At the current price the shares involved were worth roughly $7.5 billion.

Companies do not usually announce the cancellation of a trading plan. That Oracle put out a release on a Saturday, and spelled out that nothing had been sold and that nothing else is planned, indicates how much the reporting had unsettled investors.

Selling would have broken a forty-year pattern. Ellison holds about 1.16 billion Oracle shares, roughly 40% of the company, on a cost basis close to zero, and he has funded his spending by borrowing against them rather than realising gains and paying capital gains tax. Filings have shown between 277 million and 346 million of those shares pledged against personal loans, under an exception Oracle wrote for him in 2018 when it barred other directors and executives from pledging.

The collateral has lost a great deal of value. Oracle has fallen about 64% from its September 2025 peak above $345, when investors were buying its artificial intelligence cloud business, and closed near $150 last week. S&P has cut the company to one notch above junk, and it carries around $117 billion of bonds against heavy data centre spending.

Ellison was briefly the richest person in the world on Sept. 10, 2025, at close to $393 billion. Forbes put him at $201 to $203 billion in early 2026, sixth globally.

He also has a large commitment outstanding. Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion of the equity financing for the $110 billion merger of Paramount Skydance, run by his son David, with Warner Bros. Discovery, and the Ellison Family Trust that holds his Oracle shares provides a $45.7 billion equity backstop. Twelve state attorneys general sued in July to block the deal despite Justice Department approval in June, with a $7 billion termination fee at stake.