The Million Dollar Question: How much of his Oracle stake has Larry Ellison pledged against loans?
The Million Dollar Question this Friday:
Roughly what share of his Oracle stock had Larry Ellison pledged as collateral for personal loans, according to Oracle’s September 2026 proxy?
A) About 5% B) About 15% C) About 36% D) About 75%
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Most people guess A or B, either a token amount or a cautious slice. Billionaires are assumed to be cash-rich, and pledging a large part of your own company’s stock sounds like something only a founder in trouble would do. The actual answer is C: about 36%.
Oracle’s definitive proxy statement, filed September 25, 2026, discloses that Ellison “had pledged 413 million Oracle common shares as collateral to secure personal indebtedness.” He owns about 1.16 billion shares, roughly 40% of the company, so 413 million is about 36% of his stake. At the $137.10 closing price used in that report, the pledged block is worth about $57 billion. A year earlier, the 2025 proxy put the figure at 346 million shares, or about 30%. That is the number in our flagship post, and in twelve months it rose by 67 million shares.
The mechanism is the same one an ordinary household uses with a securities-backed line of credit, at a far larger scale. Ellison keeps the shares, the votes and the dividends. The lenders hold a claim on the stock, and he gets cash without selling. Selling would mean a capital gains bill and a public Form 4 filing, and the market would read it as a signal. Borrowing against the stock avoids all three.
What makes the number stand out is the rulebook around it. Oracle has an anti-pledging policy covering every employee and director “except Mr. Ellison,” and the proxy says his pledging is “carefully monitored” by the board’s Governance Committee. The committee’s stated view is that the loans pose no material risk, because Ellison could repay them without selling the pledged shares.
What this reveals: at the top of the wealth distribution, debt is not a sign of being short of money. It is how a person who owns almost nothing but one stock pays for things while keeping that stock. The risk is concentration. A large drop in Oracle’s share price would hit the collateral and the borrower’s net worth at the same moment.
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This question is treated in full in Borrowing Against Wealth: Why the Rich Often Use Debt. It covers how securities-backed lending works, what it costs, who uses it at each wealth level, and the margin-call failure mode that can turn a sound strategy into a forced sale. For the term itself, see the glossary entry on SBLOCs.
If you have a Million Dollar Question you’d like to see treated in a future Friday email, send it to [email protected].
— Logan Pierce
Editor, How Millionaires Live
