American billionaire Larry Ellison's Oracle raises $20 billion as his fortune halves

Oracle Corp., the software company co-founded by American billionaire Larry Ellison, has raised $20 billion from a sale of new shares and bonds, selling the stock at a discount as investors grow uneasy about its borrowing to build data centers for artificial intelligence.

The company priced 86,206,897 new shares at $116 each late on Monday, raising about $10 billion, and sold a further $10 billion of senior notes. The bonds come in five fixed-rate series maturing between 2029 and 2046, with coupons ranging from 7% to 8.65%, the highest rate on $1.5 billion of notes due 2046. Oracle expects net proceeds of about $9.9 billion from the shares and about $10 billion from the notes, and said the money will go to general corporate purposes, which may include capital spending, repaying debt and acquisitions. Both sales are due to close on Wednesday, Nov. 4.

The share price was about 2.7% below Monday's close and about 11% below Friday's close of $130.67. Oracle's stock fell 8.8% to about $119 on Monday after the offering was announced, its third straight daily loss, leaving it about 17.5% below its Oct. 28 close of $144.54. The new shares add about 2.85% to the 3.02 billion Oracle shares that were outstanding at the end of August.

The funding pledge

The raise came five days after Oracle told investors at an event in Las Vegas on Oct. 28 that it needed only one more round of outside money to finish its AI spending cycle. Chief Financial Officer Hilary Maxson said "this $20 billion, split evenly between debt and equity, is the final amount needed to fund the remainder of this cycle."

At the same event, Oracle said capital spending would peak this fiscal year and next, kept its forecast of $70 billion in capital expenditure for the current year, and said free cash flow would turn positive in the second half of fiscal 2028 and top $30 billion in fiscal 2029. Its shares jumped more than 12% on the forecasts. Those gains have since been erased.

Oracle has already leaned heavily on capital markets this year. It completed a $20 billion at-the-market stock sale in the first quarter of its fiscal year, which ended in August, and had $125.34 billion in notes payable and other borrowings on Aug. 31, against about $36.37 billion in cash.

Ellison's shrinking fortune

The selloff has cut deep into Ellison's wealth. The 82-year-old is now the world's ninth-richest person, with a net worth of $164 billion, down $159 billion, or 49.2%, over the past year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He began 2026 ranked fifth. Oracle's shares have fallen about 39% this year and more than 53% since November 2025.

In September 2025, a one-day jump of about 40% in Oracle's shares briefly made Ellison the richest person in the world.

Ellison owns about 1.16 billion Oracle shares, according to the company's proxy statement filed on Sept. 25. At the $116 offering price, that holding is worth about $135 billion. He has pledged about 413 million of those shares as collateral for personal loans.

In September, a regulatory filing showed that Ellison had adopted a trading plan on June 22 that would have allowed him to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, then worth about $7.5 billion, before the end of October. The plan became public on Sept. 11, and Oracle said the next day that he had cancelled it. No shares were sold under the plan, and the company said Ellison had no other plans to sell his Oracle stock.

Ellison co-founded Oracle in 1977 and ran it as chief executive until 2014. He is now its executive chairman and chief technology officer. His son, David Ellison, runs Paramount Skydance Corp.