Oracle delivered one of the biggest cloud-earnings beats of the year this week, then spent the next 48 hours fending off questions about its finances — culminating Saturday in the unusual spectacle of founder Larry Ellison unwinding a stock-sale plan worth up to $7.5 billion less than a day after it came to light.
The database giant's fiscal first-quarter revenue rose 30% from a year earlier to $19.3 billion, beating Wall Street's consensus estimate of roughly $19.1 billion, according to Oracle's earnings release. Total cloud revenue climbed 62% to $11.6 billion, and cloud infrastructure revenue — the business renting out computing power to AI developers — more than doubled, up 121% to $7.4 billion.
Oracle also raised its outlook for the fiscal year, telling investors it now expects total revenue of at least $90 billion and non-GAAP earnings of $8.10 a share, up sharply from the roughly $70 billion the company reported for fiscal 2026.
A debt load that keeps growing
In an ordinary quarter, those numbers might have produced an unambiguous rally. Instead, investors focused on the other side of the ledger: Oracle's total debt has climbed to roughly $125 billion as the company borrows heavily to build data centers for OpenAI, Meta and other AI customers. Oracle kept its capital-spending target at $90 billion to $95 billion for the year, with a large share funded through debt rather than cash the business generates on its own — a gap credit-rating agencies have flagged repeatedly. S&P Global cut Oracle's rating in July, and Moody's rates the company two notches above junk with a negative outlook, citing Oracle among the riskiest of the major AI infrastructure spenders on a cash-flow basis.
Shares jumped as much as 8.5% in after-hours and early trading before the enthusiasm faded; Oracle closed nearly 2% lower on the day. The stock is still down more than 15% for 2026 even after the move, reflecting persistent investor unease about how the company pays for its buildout. Sell-side analysts, however, remained largely constructive, with the bulk of Wall Street ratings still at buy, and executives said the quarter included more than $30 billion in new AI-related contracts — evidence, they argued, that customer demand is outrunning even Oracle's aggressive spending.
The muted market reaction stood in contrast to a year earlier, when Oracle shares surged 36% in a single session after a similarly strong quarterly report. That gap is a rough measure of how much more skeptical investors have grown about the sustainability of Oracle's spending, even as its cloud business keeps accelerating.
Ellison's about-face
Then came Friday's twist. A regulatory filing showed that Executive Chair and founder Larry Ellison had adopted a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan on June 22 permitting him to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares — worth about $7.5 billion at recent prices — through Oct. 24. Because Ellison almost never sells Oracle stock, preferring to borrow against his roughly 1.16-billion-share stake, equal to about 40% of the company, the disclosure alone made headlines.
Less than a day later, Oracle said Ellison had scrapped the plan entirely. In a statement distributed Saturday, the company said:
No Oracle stock was sold under that plan, and he has no other plans to sell any of his Oracle stock.
Oracle Corporation, in a statement
Oracle did not explain why the plan was adopted or why it was withdrawn so quickly, and a spokesperson offered no further detail in the days after the filing. The reversal left analysts and investors to speculate about internal deliberations at a company whose finances are drawing closer scrutiny than at any point since the AI buildout began.
For now, the earnings themselves settled little. Oracle's cloud business is growing faster than almost any other large technology company's, but the debt financing it — and the ambiguity around its largest shareholder's trading intentions — will likely keep the stock volatile heading into the company's next quarterly report and its continued rollout of AI data-center capacity.
