Ellison Cancels $7.5 Billion Oracle Stock Sale One Day After Disclosure

Quick Facts

• Ellison canceled a Rule 10b5-1 plan to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, worth roughly $7.5 billion, before any shares were sold.
• Oracle posted record Q1 FY2027 revenue of $19.3 billion, up 30% year over year, with cloud infrastructure revenue surging 121%.
• Oracle’s stock is down 22% year to date and the company carries roughly $117 billion in debt, one notch above junk status from S&P Global.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison canceled his plan to sell as many as 50 million shares of Oracle stock, a stake worth approximately $7.5 billion, just one day after the company disclosed the divestment plan in a regulatory filing.

Oracle confirmed the cancellation publicly on September 12, 2026. “No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock,” the company said. No reason was given for the change.

Ellison adopted the Rule 10b5-1 trading plan on June 22, 2026. The plan would have allowed him to sell shares through October 24. A Rule 10b5-1 arrangement lets executives schedule stock sales in advance so the transactions cannot be read as trades on inside information.

Had the sale completed in full, it would have been the largest insider transaction in Oracle’s history. Ellison has not sold more than 25,000 shares at any one time this century. The proposed sale would have been roughly 2,000 times larger than those prior transactions.

Ellison currently holds approximately 1.16 billion Oracle shares, representing a roughly 40% stake in the company. Even after a full sale, he would have retained about 1.1 billion shares. A person close to Ellison told reporters he views the shares as undervalued.

Oracle stock closed at $150.28 on September 11, the day the cancellation was filed, down 1.82% on the session. Shares have fallen roughly 22% year to date from $193.03 at year-end 2025 and are off more than 50% from their 52-week high of $304.38. Oracle stock had dropped approximately 16% to 18% since Ellison adopted the trading plan in late June.

The cancellation comes one day after Oracle reported record quarterly earnings. The company posted Q1 FY2027 total revenue of $19.3 billion, up 30% year over year. Total cloud revenue rose 62% to $11.6 billion. Cloud infrastructure revenue surged 121% to $7.4 billion. Net income climbed 60% to $4.7 billion, or $1.56 per share, beating Wall Street expectations on both measures.

Remaining performance obligations rose by $209 billion year over year to $664 billion. Ellison cited cloud momentum during the earnings call, pointing to multicloud database revenue from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft growing at 1,529% in Q1.

Despite the strong quarter, Oracle faces significant financial pressure. S&P Global Ratings downgraded Oracle on July 9, 2026, cutting its long-term issuer credit rating from BBB to BBB-, one notch above speculative grade. S&P cited Oracle’s exposure to OpenAI, which accounts for roughly half of the company’s $664 billion in remaining performance obligations. OpenAI has never generated a profit.

Oracle now carries roughly $117 billion in debt, ranking second only to Amazon among non-financial issuers in the Bloomberg US Corporate Bond Index. Free cash flow for fiscal year 2026 was negative $23.69 billion, while capital expenditures reached $55.66 billion. Total liabilities stand at $218.7 billion.

George Catrambone, head of fixed income at DWS Americas, told Bloomberg that investors are demanding higher returns because of uncertainty over whether Oracle’s AI investments will generate sufficient revenue to justify its growing debt load.

Earlier in 2026, Oracle cut approximately 21,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce, citing AI-related spending as a factor in the reductions.

For software and technology executives, the episode signals that even the largest planned insider sales can reverse quickly when stock prices decline and strategic sentiment shifts. Ellison’s decision to walk away from $7.5 billion in liquidity, after Oracle’s stock fell sharply from its highs, sends a public message about his view of the company’s direction in cloud and AI infrastructure.

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