Larry Ellison cancels a .5B Oracle stock sale one day after disclosure
Oracle said on Saturday that Larry Ellison has cancelled the plan that would have let him sell up to 50 million of his Oracle shares, worth roughly $7.5 billion at the price at the time. The reversal landed one day after the plan became public in a routine quarterly filing.
The vehicle was a Rule 10b5-1 plan, the pre-set trading schedule an insider adopts so sales run on a timetable rather than on what they know. Oracle’s Form 10-Q, filed on September 11, says Ellison adopted the plan on June 22, 2026, and that it was scheduled to terminate on October 24, 2026. The same disclosure puts the ceiling at 50 million shares of common stock.
No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock.
Oracle Corporation, press release of September 12, 2026, filed as Exhibit 99.1
That’s the whole explanation. The release gives no reason for the change, and neither does the Form 8-K that carried it to the SEC on Monday. TechCrunch reported the same gap, noting the company didn’t offer a reason.
What makes the episode odd is how little Ellison has sold before. CNBC reported, citing FactSet, that he hasn’t sold more than 25,000 Oracle shares at any one time since the start of this century, and that he’d still hold 1.1 billion shares if the full plan had run. He controls over 40% of the company he founded in 1977.
That stake is most of his fortune, which is why a scheduled sale drew attention at all. Forbes put Ellison at $189.4 billion and seventh in the world on September 14, 2026, on a real-time estimate that moves with Oracle’s share price. So 50 million shares would have been a break with that pattern.
The plan also surfaced days after Oracle posted the quarter that turned it into an AI infrastructure story. Cloud infrastructure revenue grew 121% year over year in the three months to August 31, 2026, according to the company’s own results release.
| Oracle Q1 FY27 (quarter to Aug 31, 2026) | Result | Year-over-year |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenues | $19.3B | up 30% |
| Cloud revenues (IaaS and SaaS) | $11.6B | up 62% |
| Cloud infrastructure (IaaS) | $7.4B | up 121% |
| Remaining performance obligations | $664B | up $209B |
| Free cash flow | negative $5B | not stated |
The catch sits on the other side of the balance sheet. The same 10-Q shows $117.7 billion of non-current notes payable and other borrowings as of August 31, 2026, with a further $7.6 billion due inside a year. Free cash flow was negative $5 billion for the quarter, which Oracle attributes to investment in the cloud infrastructure business. Debt-funded capacity is the pattern across the sector, and Nvidia named its own $33.5 billion debt load as a risk factor after a bond sale.
Investors haven’t rewarded the buildout. Oracle stock is down somewhere between 20% and 23% this year, depending on the day the figure was taken. CNBC used roughly 20% on Friday and roughly 23% on Saturday, while TechCrunch had 22% on Sunday. That spread shows how fast the number moves, and it’s the backdrop to the AI bubble question.
What happens next is visible in the filings rather than the press releases. The 10-Q says actual sales under a plan like this get disclosed in future Section 16 filings, so a Form 4 from Ellison is the document that would cut against Saturday’s statement. Until one shows up, Oracle’s position is that nothing was sold and nothing else is planned.
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