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Larry Ellison has pledged 67 million more Oracle shares as collateral for personal loans than he had a year ago, according to a proxy statement the company filed on Friday, Sept. 25.
The additional stock is worth about $9.2 billion at Oracle's closing price of $137.10 that day, and represents a 19% increase in what he had pledged in 2025.
His total is now about 413 million shares, roughly 36% of the 1.16 billion Oracle shares he owns, worth around $57 billion at the same price.
Pledging is how the very rich spend money without selling anything. Ellison hands shares to a lender as security, borrows against them, and keeps both the stock and the votes attached to it. He also avoids the capital gains tax bill a sale would trigger, which on a position built since the 1970s would be enormous. He has been doing it since 2007.
Oracle does not allow anyone else at the company to do this. Its policy bars officers and directors from pledging Oracle stock as loan collateral, with an exception written specifically for Ellison, who co-founded the company in 1977 and remains its largest shareholder.
What the money is going towards is his son's takeover bid. David Ellison is trying to complete a $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery through Paramount Skydance, and the family and its co-investors have committed $47 billion of equity to it, including roughly $24 billion from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Paramount is raising debt to cover the rest.
That deal cleared a significant obstacle this week. Paramount settled with attorneys general from 12 states and with the Writers Guild of America, both of which had sued to block the merger.
Ellison nearly went the other way this month. He disclosed in early September that he planned to sell as much as $7.5 billion of Oracle stock, about 50 million shares, between June and October, then abandoned the plan within days.
The same filing set out what Oracle is paying its leadership. Co-chief executives Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia, who took over from Safra Catz a year ago, received stock option awards valued at $621.7 million and $248.7 million. Ellison received a grant worth $117.8 million, his first in two fiscal years after taking nothing in the previous two.
Oracle's board has been watching the pledges. Its governance committee said in the proxy that it takes regular outside legal advice on the risks involved, and that it does not consider the arrangements a material risk to the company or its shareholders. The pledged shares secure personal term loans used to fund outside business ventures, it said, and none of them sit in margin accounts.
Analysts are less relaxed. Heavily pledged holdings can amplify a fall in a share price, because if the stock drops far enough lenders may ask the borrower to post more collateral or repay early, which in the worst case forces selling into a falling market. Ellison's wealth would make that an extreme scenario.
Almost all of that wealth sits in one stock. Oracle shares have surged over the past two years on demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure, which is what has made Ellison, 82, one of the richest people alive, and what now underwrites his family's move into Hollywood.
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