---
title: Larry Ellison Cancels His $7.5 Billion Oracle Stock Sale
description: Larry Ellison cancelled a plan to sell up to $7.5 billion of Oracle stock, holding his stake as Oracle pours tens of billions into an AI cloud buildout.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-09-13T10:13:39.070Z
updated: 2026-09-13T10:13:39.078Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/larry-ellison-oracle-stock-sale-cancelled
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/larry-ellison-oracle-openworld-290555.webp
categories: Markets
content_type: Analysis
region: Global
publication: Sovereign Magazine
schema_type: Article
---

Larry Ellison has called off the largest stock sale he ever scheduled. Oracle said on September 12 that its executive chair and chief technology officer cancelled a prearranged plan to sell up to $7.5 billion of Oracle stock, and that he has no other plans to sell any of his shares. No stock changed hands under the plan before he ended it.

## The Plan Covered Up to $7.5 Billion in Oracle Stock

Ellison adopted the plan on June 22, when Oracle stock traded around $175. He cancelled it on September 12, with the shares near $150, roughly 14% lower than when he set it up. The plan, a prearranged 10b5-1 schedule, covered up to $7.5 billion, about 50 million shares, and was originally meant to run through October 24. Ellison has usually sold Oracle stock in small tranches of around 25,000 shares at a time, so a sale on this scale would have been highly unusual for him.

## A $638 Billion Backlog Behind the Decision

Ellison is holding the stock as Oracle books the largest cloud backlog in its history. Oracle's remaining performance obligations, the contracted cloud business it reports as [RPO](https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2026/Oracle-Announces-Record-Q4-and-FY-2026-Results-Driven-by-Cloud-Infrastructure--Cloud-Applications/default.aspx), reached $638 billion as of the quarter ended August 31, up 363% from a year earlier. A large share of that comes from AI cloud contracts, including the [Stargate deal](https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/machine-learning/article/55316610/openai-and-oracles-300b-stargate-deal-building-ais-national-scale-infrastructure) with OpenAI, a roughly $300 billion compute commitment over five years that forms part of a wider buildout expanding toward about 7 gigawatts of capacity and more than $400 billion in total investment. Oracle also reported cloud revenue up 44% year over year in the same quarter, which management called its strongest organic quarter in more than 15 years, and raised its guidance toward about $90 billion in revenue for fiscal 2027.

## The Buildout Comes at a Steep Cost

Meeting those commitments requires capital spending on a scale Oracle has not attempted before: about $55.7 billion in fiscal 2026, rising to roughly $70 billion expected in fiscal 2027. Free cash flow was negative about $23.7 billion last year. To fund it, Oracle raised about $43 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity in fiscal 2026, and expects to raise around $40 billion more in the current year.

## Investors Want Proof the Spending Pays Off

Oracle stock has stayed well below its high even as the earnings beats and raised guidance have piled up. The shares are down roughly 55% from their September 2025 peak and about 22% so far in 2026. The caution among investors is about returns rather than demand: no hyperscaler has yet shown a positive return on AI infrastructure at this scale, and some analysts warn the industry may be [building years of capacity ahead of proven demand](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/asml-bic-north-campus-ai-chip-demand). By cancelling the sale, Ellison is signaling that he expects Oracle's cloud backlog to convert into profit before the spending catches up with it. Ellison, whose net worth is around $201 billion and who briefly became the world's second-richest person in June, is keeping his Oracle stock rather than selling into the decline.

## FAQ

**Q: What is a 10b5-1 plan?**
It is a prearranged schedule that lets a company insider buy or sell their own stock at set times. The plan provides a legal safeguard against accusations of trading on inside information.

**Q: Why is cancelling the plan read as a sign of confidence?**
Ellison did not simply pause the sale, he ended it and said he has no other plans to sell any of his shares. Declining to sell after the stock had already fallen is generally read as an insider who expects the shares to recover. He also remains free to adopt a new plan or sell at his own discretion later, so the move preserves flexibility rather than locking him in.

**Q: When does Oracle's cloud backlog turn into revenue?**
Remaining performance obligations are contracted business Oracle has booked but not yet delivered, so the backlog becomes revenue as Oracle supplies the cloud capacity over the life of those contracts. That is why the data center buildout comes first: the capacity has to exist before the contracted revenue can be earned.

**Q: How is Oracle paying for the buildout?**
Its operating cash is not covering the spending. With free cash flow negative last year, Oracle is funding much of the buildout by borrowing and raising new equity rather than from the cash the business generates, which adds interest costs and leverage to the bet.