Oracle co-CEO sells $3.4 million in shares as stock falls 56% one year after his appointment
Mike Sicilia's sale comes almost exactly one year after he and Clay Magouyrk replaced Safra Catz, as Oracle cuts thousands of jobs while dramatically increasing spending on AI infrastructure.
Oracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia sold $3.42 million worth of company shares this week, a transaction that comes as the software giant is cutting thousands of jobs while committing tens of billions of dollars to expand its AI infrastructure.
Sicilia sold 22,562 Oracle shares on September 22 at an average price of $151.59, according to a regulatory filing. The transaction was carried out under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted on December 24, 2025, meaning the sale was arranged months in advance rather than necessarily reflecting a decision made in response to recent developments at the company.
The sale came almost exactly one year after Sicilia and Clay Magouyrk were appointed Oracle's co-CEOs, replacing Safra Catz, who became executive vice chair of the board. Oracle announced the leadership change on September 22, 2025.
Oracle's stock closed at $328.15 on the day the two executives were appointed. It was trading at around $144.44 on September 23, representing a decline of roughly 56% over the period.
Sicilia's latest transaction followed a series of stock movements connected to his compensation. He received 35,802 shares from restricted stock units on September 19 and another 73,411 shares on September 20. On September 21, Oracle withheld 17,311 and 35,495 shares to cover taxes associated with the vesting, at $147.61 a share.
The sale itself therefore does not necessarily signal that Sicilia has changed his view of Oracle. The shares were sold through the previously established trading plan, and the transaction came alongside routine equity vesting and tax withholding.
But the timing puts the sale against a striking backdrop at Oracle.
The company eliminated approximately 21,000 positions during the fiscal year that ended in May, equivalent to about 13% of its workforce. Oracle has explicitly said that the adoption and deployment of AI technologies contributed to workforce reductions and could continue to do so. The cuts included about 7,000 jobs in research and development, 6,000 in sales and marketing, and roughly 3,000 each in cloud and services.
The restructuring has not ended. Oracle began another round of layoffs in September, telling affected employees that their positions were being eliminated as part of a “broader organizational change.” The company has not disclosed how many employees are affected.
Oracle has also raised the expected cost of its fiscal 2026 restructuring program by $700 million, to approximately $2.8 billion. The program includes severance, contract terminations and other costs associated with reshaping the company.
At the same time, Oracle is moving in the opposite direction when it comes to spending.
The company spent $28.5 billion on capital expenditures in its latest quarter, compared with $8.5 billion a year earlier. It expects fiscal 2027 capital expenditures of between $90 billion and $95 billion, as it builds data centers and other infrastructure to meet demand for AI computing.
The scale of the investment is being reflected in Oracle's financial results. In its latest quarter, revenue rose 30% to $19.3 billion, while cloud infrastructure revenue more than doubled to $7.4 billion. Oracle's remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue, rose by $209 billion year over year to $664 billion.
Oracle has said it plans to raise $40 billion through debt and equity during the current fiscal year, while its AI infrastructure buildout has contributed to negative free cash flow. The company completed a $20 billion stock sale in the first quarter.
The contrast between the layoffs and the spending has also been acknowledged internally. After another round of layoffs began this month, Oracle's new CFO, Hilary Maxson, told employees that the company did not want them simply to “do more with less.” Instead, she said Oracle needed to become more selective about where it puts its money and employees' time as it dramatically increases investment in AI infrastructure.
Sicilia himself has urged employees to focus on the impact of their work on customers. “I'd ask you to keep asking a very simple question: How does the work that I'm doing help deliver a better outcome for a customer?” he said at a companywide meeting.
Sicilia is not the only Oracle insider whose stock plans have attracted attention. Larry Ellison, Oracle's executive chairman and chief technology officer, adopted a 10b5-1 plan in June that would have allowed him to sell up to 50 million Oracle shares. The plan was subsequently canceled on September 12, however, and Oracle said that no shares had been sold under it and that Ellison had no other plans to sell Oracle stock.
