The trading plan Larry Ellison cancelled on Saturday had never been allowed to sell a single share of Oracle. The company's quarterly filing on Friday disclosed that Ellison, its executive chair and chief technology officer, adopted a plan on June 22 permitting him to sell up to 50 million shares, scheduled to run until October 24 — a Rule 10b5-1 arrangement, the standard prearranged-selling instrument for corporate insiders.
At Friday's close it covered about $7.5 billion of stock in a company whose shares are down roughly 22 percent this year. On Saturday Oracle said the plan had been cancelled, that no stock was sold under it, and that he has no other plans to sell any.
Since 2023, an SEC rule has barred an officer or director from trading under one of these plans until the later of two dates: 90 days after adoption, or two business days after the company reports results for the quarter in which the plan was adopted. Ninety days from June 22 is September 20. And the reason the plan was in the newspapers at all is the other half of the same rule, which requires companies to state in each quarterly report whether an officer started or stopped one. Oracle's quarter ended August 31, results came on September 10, the filing followed on the 11th. The freeze and the disclosure run off the same report, so the arrangement surfaced eighty-one days after it was made and nine days before it could do anything.
None of which made it theoretical. From September 21 to October 24 the plan would have been live for thirty-three days with authority over 50 million shares, about 1.7 percent of the company, in a market that had just absorbed the $19.9 billion of new stock Oracle itself sold last quarter. The cancellation landed nine days before the thaw.
What the filing calendar catches is selling. It does not catch borrowing. Oracle's most recent proxy, from September 2025, reports that Ellison had pledged 346 million of his shares as collateral securing personal term loans, nearly seven times the number in the plan he just cancelled, under a company policy that bars every other Oracle director and officer from pledging anything at all. No quarterly report announces when that figure moves.
What ended on Saturday was an authorization, not a sale. It existed for eighty-one days, none of them with the power to sell, and it stopped nine days before that would have changed. The filing calendar tells you what an insider arranged in June. It does not tell you what he is doing now.
What ended on Saturday was an authorization, not a sale.
