Larry Ellison pledges 67 million more Oracle shares against personal loans

Oracle’s latest proxy filing shows that chief technology officer Larry Ellison has pledged 67 million more shares as collateral for personal loans than he had a year earlier, Yahoo Finance reported⁴. Stocks Down Under put the value of that additional pledge at about $9.2 billion⁸. Business Standard reported the same figure¹. Seeking Alpha carried the disclosure as Ellison pledging 67 million more Oracle shares as loan collateral⁵.

TradingKey said the pledged collateral rose 19% to 67 million shares and filed the disclosure under insider collateral leverage and governance concerns³. Pluang put the increase at 19% to $9.2 billion and said it was partly to support the Paramount Skydance acquisition⁶. Forbes reported that the same filing shows Ellison has pledged $56.6 billion in Oracle shares as loan collateral in total².

The rest of the proxy

The filing also disclosed pay. Forbes reported that an Oracle co-chief executive was paid 6,623 times the company’s median worker².

Seeking Alpha noted that Oracle officers and directors are generally prohibited from pledging shares⁵. Separately, Foreign Policy Journal reported that Ellison cancelled a plan to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares, a sale it put at $7.5 billion, and said the decision leaves the investment case unchanged⁷.

Yahoo Finance and Stocks Down Under both framed the disclosure as the founder putting more stock behind his borrowings rather than selling it, which keeps the shares in his name while creating an obligation against them^4,8.

Why it matters to investors

Pledged stock is a second claim on shares that are already counted in the float. The proxy puts a number on how much of the largest holder’s position is encumbered: $56.6 billion in total², of which about $9.2 billion was added in the past year^1,8.

TradingKey raised the governance question directly, listing the pledge alongside a 3.61% fall in Oracle stock on the day³. Pluang’s account ties part of the borrowing to a specific transaction rather than to general liquidity⁶.

What to watch: whether later filings show the pledged total rising further from $56.6 billion², whether the scrapped sale of up to 50 million shares is revived⁷, and how the board handles a practice its own policy generally prohibits^3,5.

Business Standard noted only that the additional stock is worth about $9.2 billion, without giving the loan terms behind it¹. None of the reporting sets out the lenders, the maturities, or the price at which collateral would have to be topped up^4,5.