Redwood City, September 13 – Oracle announced on Saturday that Larry Ellison, the company’s co-founder and executive chairman, has called off a programme that would have let him offload up to $7.5 billion in shares. A 10b5-1 trading plan adopted in late June would have permitted the disposal of 50 million shares through late October. Zero shares were sold. The company states no other sale programmes are in place.
The narrative opens with a regulatory filing. Oracle published details of the programme on September 11. Termination followed one day later. The plan was created when the stock traded higher. Since that point, shares have declined approximately twenty-two percent year to date. The close on the cancellation day was $150.28.
At its core, this action transmits a signal. Ellison helped launch the enterprise and retains roughly forty percent. He has historically sold minimal amounts of his holding. The programme itself was atypical. Cancelling it eliminates a market overhang. For other shareholders, the withdrawal reads as a public expression of confidence from the executive who understands Oracle’s AI cloud trajectory better than anyone.
The decision coincides with a quarter that recast Oracle as a large-scale AI infrastructure provider. First-quarter revenue for fiscal 2027 touched $19.345 billion. That represents a nearly thirty percent year-over-year increase. It surpassed consensus estimates. Cloud infrastructure revenue more than doubled, reaching $7.388 billion.
Remaining performance obligations climbed to $664 billion, a $209 billion year-over-year gain. The firm secured more than $30 billion in fresh AI cloud contracts during the quarter. Oracle added 850 megawatts of extra datacenter capacity and brought over 300,000 GPUs online for clients. GPU utilisation reached ninety-seven point nine percent. Renewal pricing landed at a twenty percent premium versus earlier contracts.
Guidance shifted upward. Oracle now projects fiscal 2027 revenue of at least ninety billion dollars and non-GAAP earnings per share of $8.10. For the second quarter, management guided total revenue expansion of thirty to thirty-four percent and cloud revenue expansion of sixty-five to seventy-one percent.
The near-term outlook still reveals pressure. Free cash flow came in at negative $5.396 billion. Capital outlays reached $28.499 billion. Interest costs rose fifty-five percent to $1.4 billion. Oracle finished a $20 billion at-the-market equity programme. That spending wall is what investors are balancing against a stock that has fallen more than twenty percent since January.
The next catalyst sits on the calendar. Oracle intends to debut an accelerator for agentic AI at AI World in October. The board authorised a fifty-cent per share quarterly dividend. The record date is October 9. The payment date is October 23. For long-term holders, Ellison’s cancelled $7.5 billion sale stands as the strongest insider signal Oracle has generated in years. The individual with the most to gain from a recovery simply chose to wait.
Sources
- Google News – News about Oracle • Larry Ellison • stock – Overview
- On Second Thought, Never Mind: Here's Why ORCL's Larry Ellison Just Canceled $7.5 Billion Stock Sale – 24/7 Wall St.
- Larry Ellison cancels $7.5 billion sale of Oracle stock | TechCrunch
- Larry Ellison Cancels His Plan to Sell Oracle Stock | Oracle Investor Relations (official)
