Oracle awarded co-founder Larry Ellison and its newly minted co-CEOs stock option packages with a combined grant-date value of $988 million in fiscal 2026, a year that saw its cloud business boom and shares post a 38% total return. By the time the fiscal year ended on May 31, every one of those options were underwater.
The decline is unsurprising, given Oracle stock’s volatile year and the fact that the options were priced near the peak. Oracle, alongside other mega-cap tech companies, has been racing to finance and build data centers while splashing out $55.7 billion in capital last fiscal year along the way. On Friday, Oracle stock closed at $137, down 53% in the past 12 months. The company’s proxy statement published on Friday marked the decline among all three packages, noting that their awards “had no intrinsic value” at fiscal year end. The strike prices on the options, meaning the price at which the options can be cashed in, are higher than the current price of Oracle’s stock.
Ellison’s award was valued at $117.8 million when it was granted in October and carries a strike price of $280, while the exercise price for co-CEOs Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia is $308. Magouyrk and Sicilia got their packages—valued at $621.7 million and $248.7 million, respectively—just days after their September 2025 promotions. The duo succeeded ex-CEO Safra Catz, who remains as executive vice chair. The stock needs to more than double for Magouyrk and Sicilia to cash in on their options.
Conversely, new Chief Financial Officer Hilary Maxson, appointed in April 2026, opted into a new program Oracle rolled out in fiscal 2026. Under the “Equity Choice Program,” executives can choose to get their time-based equity in the form of 100% stock options, 100% restricted stock units, or a 50-50 mix of stock options and RSUs.
If you choose stock options, you get four times the number of options as the number of RSUs that would have been granted because stock options are only worthwhile if the stock goes up. The rub, however, is that if the stock tumbles as it has been, those options are completely out of the money. (Oracle values its options differently from other firms, treating four options as a single share. Its own figures add up to a total of $400 million for Ellison, Magouyrk, and Sicilia.)
Maxson was hired with a roughly $30 million total pay package, including a $26 million equity award and chose to put $10.4 million into RSUs, according to Oracle’s disclosures. The shares were worth $12.7 million at fiscal year end, and have dropped to $7.7 million based on Friday’s stock close. The rest of her award is in options priced at $185, which are also underwater. Catz, chief legal officer Stuart Levey, and operations chief Douglas Kehring all opted for RSUs while global field operations president Mark Hura chose options.
The reason for the size of the awards, according to Oracle, is the competitive hiring market for veteran cloud and AI leaders. In its proxy statement, Oracle told investors the fact that Ellison and the co-CEOs’ options had no intrinsic value means the plan is working as intended. Stock options, which have largely disappeared among publicly traded Fortune 500 companies in favor of performance shares and RSUs, “are strongly performance-based,” Oracle board stated in the report.
“The Compensation Committee did not take any special actions to compensate executives for potential losses in stock option value,” the company wrote.
Meanwhile, despite the volatility and sliding stock price, cloud revenue rose 39% to $34 billion, cloud infrastructure revenue grew 77% to $18.1 billion and overall revenue was up 17% to $67.4 billion. Remaining performance obligations ballooned to $638 billion by fiscal year-end compared to $138 billion last fiscal year.
However, the company’s 10-K notes that free cash flow was negative $23.7 billion and Oracle sold $43 billion of senior notes. During the summer, Oracle sold $20 billion of stock at $141 a share. In turn, investors have been punishing the stock. Bloomberg reported this week that Oracle’s decision to invoke force majeure on a New Mexico data center sent the cost of insuring its debt against default to a record.
Still, the fiscal 2026 results were enough to secure some cash for Ellison and the co-CEOs. All three got $4.9 million in cash bonuses. Ellison even got a raise, going from a base salary of $1 to $950,000, the same as Magouyrk and Sicilia.
It hasn’t been as fun a time for Oracle employees, however. Oracle has cut staff via layoffs, and the majority of its outstanding options company-wide are also underwater. Total compensation of Oracle’s median global employee was $94,740 in fiscal 2026, down from $98,899 in fiscal 2025.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Shareholders will vote on its pay plan on Nov. 18.