Larry Ellison has killed a plan that could have moved as much as $7.5 billion of his Oracle shares into the market, only a day after the plan became public.
Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) said Saturday that its co-founder would not sell any stock under the arrangement. The Austin, Texas company disclosed a day earlier that Larry had been cleared to sell up to 50 million shares by the end of October.
Oracle said, “No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock.” The company did not give a reason for the reversal.
The plan had been created in late June, according to Oracle’s latest quarterly filing. With Oracle closing Friday at $150 a share, the full amount covered by the plan was worth about $7.5 billion.
Larry pulls the sale as Oracle’s AI costs keep climbing
The abandoned auction was held shortly after Oracle announced better revenue performance in its data center division on Thursday.
Nevertheless, the shares continued to decline somewhat since investors were analyzing the margins, which have been narrowing because Oracle invests significantly into AI infrastructure.
Oracle shares are now trading 50% below the level observed after the company announced its $300 billion OpenAI partnership back in September.
The source familiar with Larry described his views on the stock. This person declined to disclose whether Larry intends to make additional purchases of Oracle shares in the coming months.
Larry currently owns 40% of Oracle and represents its largest single shareholder. According to the most recent proxy statement of the company, as of September 2025, he has pledged 346 million Oracle shares as security for his personal borrowings. His money is tied to projects outside Oracle too.
Larry is involved in several large bets connected to his family’s growing position in U.S. media. In December, he agreed to personally support $40 billion in equity financing for his son David Ellison’s hostile offer for Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD).
David runs Paramount Skydance (NASDAQ: PSKY), which has agreed to pause the proposed deal until as late as next June while 12 U.S. states try to stop it on antitrust grounds.
Larry is also paying for research projects, including the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford and the Ellison Medical Institute in Los Angeles. At the same time, Oracle, which he founded nearly 50 years ago, is being rebuilt around rising demand from AI companies that need huge amounts of data center space and computing power.
Oracle borrows, cuts jobs and races to deliver its OpenAI buildout
Larry has not joined Oracle’s latest earnings calls, even though he spent decades as one of the company’s most visible figures. A person close to him allegedly said he is still “super active” in daily decisions.
Larry has had an active hand in promoting the AI data centers that Oracle is building. This business has been the key factor in the contract that temporarily made him richer than Elon Musk. According to Bloomberg’s index of billionaires, Larry has a fortune of $204 billion and ranks seventh in the list of the richest people.
However, Oracle’s deal with OpenAI has had no smooth progress. There have been several problems related to permits and regulations. Oracle has had to borrow significant sums and issue new shares to finance the projects.
Costs are showing up elsewhere too. Oracle has carried out major layoffs. On Friday, the company said it had set aside another $700 million for severance over the next year. That follows $2.1 billion spent on severance in the last fiscal year, when tens of thousands of workers were cut.
Jim Cramer also focused on Oracle’s numbers during the September 11, 2026 episode of Mad Money. He pointed to the company’s revenue backlog as the key figure from the first-quarter balance sheet.
“We’re talking roughly $332 billion worth of contracted business. Two years ago that backlog was just 99 billion. The scale of the opportunity here has changed dramatically,” Jim said.
Jim came away from the quarter more positive on Oracle than he had been for a long time. He described the earnings call as calm and normal, with Oracle bringing new capacity online, receiving customer cash and keeping its spending forecast under control for the current plans.
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