Larry Ellison has spent most of the past two decades paying for his life the way other billionaires do: by borrowing against the stock, not by selling it. A filing on September 25 showed how far that habit now extends.
According to the proxy statement, Ellison pledged an additional 67 million Oracle shares as collateral for personal loans, a block worth roughly $9.2 billion at the closing price that day. His total pledged shares were 19% higher than a year earlier, Bloomberg reported.
The pledge is the latest step in a routine that goes back years. Ellison has long used his Oracle stake as a personal credit line, borrowing against the shares rather than selling them and triggering the capital-gains taxes a sale would create. His holdings have grown so large that even a small slice of them can secure a loan the size of a modest country’s budget. Through his family trust he controls roughly 1.16 billion shares, about 40.6% of the company, worth close to $139 billion at recent prices.
Ellison, who founded Oracle in 1977 and remains its largest shareholder and chairman, has used the same device to fund houses, yachts and an entire Hawaiian island. Pledging stock is the standard tool of the very rich: it raises cash without reducing ownership, and it keeps the tax bill at zero as long as the shares are never sold. The trade-off is that the borrower owes a bank, and the bank holds a claim on the shares.
The timing is striking for what Ellison chose not to do. Earlier this year he shelved a plan to sell as much as $7.5 billion of Oracle stock, a program investors had read as a signal that he wanted cash. Pledging the shares instead reaches a similar result, cash in hand, without actually parting with the stock.
That raises the question of what the cash is for. Bloomberg tied the pledge to the family’s financing arrangements in Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the deal that would combine two of Hollywood’s oldest studios. Ellison’s son David runs Paramount and is now racing to close the transaction, which carries a price tag of about $111 billion and would leave the combined company with net debt near $79 billion.
The elder Ellison has agreed to backstop as much as $40.4 billion of the media deal, according to disclosures. Pledging Oracle shares gives him a way to support that commitment without liquidating the stake that anchors his fortune. The family’s media ambitions have been building for years, through David Ellison’s Skydance Media, and the Warner deal is the culmination.
Oracle shareholders are watching carefully. The stock fell 1.75% on September 25, the day the filing appeared. The worry is not that Ellison will abandon the company he founded. It is that a large pledge can turn a founder into a forced seller if the share price falls and a margin call follows. A borrower who has pledged stock must generally put up more collateral, or sell, if the value drops far enough.
That risk looked remote while Oracle traded near record highs. The company has become one of the biggest winners of the artificial-intelligence buildout, with revenue up 30% in its latest quarter on demand for AI cloud services. It hosts workloads for OpenAI and other AI companies, and it has booked a backlog of data-center contracts that analysts describe as the largest in its history.
Its own debt has climbed to about $125 billion as it borrows to build those data centers, and the company has said it plans to raise up to $50 billion more in debt and equity this year to keep the buildout moving. None of that borrowing is Ellison’s personally.
Yet the parallel is difficult to miss. The company is taking on debt to fund the AI boom, while its founder is borrowing against his stake to fund a media deal. Two of the largest wagers in technology and entertainment now run through the same Oracle share price and the same pledge book.
What the filing does not show is how much Ellison has actually borrowed against his shares in total, or on what terms. Companies disclose the number of pledged shares, not the loans sitting behind them. That leaves outside investors guessing at the full picture.
Ellison is not alone in leaning on this tool. Elon Musk has pledged large blocks of Tesla stock to fund his other ventures, and other founders have done the same. Pledge levels that would once have alarmed investors are now routine enough that they barely register, except when they grow as quickly as Ellison’s have. A 19% increase in a single year is large by any standard.
For now the pledge reads as a vote of confidence dressed up as a financing move: Ellison is raising cash without selling, which implies he thinks the stock is worth more than its current price. The open question is what happens to that arithmetic if Oracle’s AI-driven rally stalls and the collateral behind two very different bets is suddenly worth less than it was on September 25.
