Days after Oracle fired as much as 30,000 staff through a 6 a.m. e-mail — as Moneywise beforehand reported — the corporate introduced its subsequent large transfer: hiring a brand new chief monetary officer with a $26 million inventory bundle.
In the meantime, some laid-off employees have raised questions on LinkedIn and office boards about how Oracle selected who to chop — with one 30-year veteran suggesting the corporate could have focused staff with excellent inventory choices.
On April 6, Oracle filed a Kind 8-Ok with the SEC saying Hilary Maxson as its new chief monetary officer, efficient instantly (1). Maxson, 48, beforehand served as government vice chairman and group CFO at Schneider Electrical, a worldwide power administration firm with greater than $45 billion in annual income (2). Earlier than Schneider, she spent 12 years on the AES Company in senior finance, technique and M&A roles (3).
Her Oracle compensation bundle, per the SEC submitting, consists of an annual base wage of $950,000 and eligibility for a performance-based bonus focusing on $2.5 million, prorated via Oracle’s fiscal year-end on Could 31. Oracle additionally agreed to cowl as much as $250,000 of her relocation prices over 12 months.
Maxson will obtain a grant valued at $26 million underneath Oracle’s Amended and Restated 2020 Fairness Incentive Plan — 80% time-based ($20.8 million) and 20% performance-based ($5.2 million). She will get to decide on whether or not to take that as 100% inventory choices or a 50/50 cut up of choices and restricted inventory items. The time-based portion vests over 4 years on a front-loaded schedule: 40% after 12 months one, 30% after 12 months two, 20% after 12 months three and 10% after 12 months 4. The efficiency fairness vests over a three-year interval ending Could 31, 2028, tied to income metrics.
Maxson reviews to CEO Clay Magouyrk. Her appointment reinstates the CFO title at Oracle for the primary time since 2014, when Safra Catz took on each the CEO and principal monetary officer roles. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana famous in a analysis be aware that hiring a CFO from an industrial firm indicators Oracle’s precedence is infrastructure buildout — not databases or functions (4)
Below Oracle’s severance phrases, staff who had been reduce had their unvested restricted inventory items forfeited instantly upon termination. Vested inventory remained accessible via Constancy (5).
Nina Lewis, a safety alert supervisor who spent greater than 30 years at Oracle, posted on LinkedIn that the layoffs appeared to “comply with an algorithm of excessive stage particular person contributors and mid-level managers — particularly these with excellent inventory choices.” The submit drew greater than 2,000 likes (6).
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Lewis later clarified in a follow-up submit that she had “NO particular inside information of any layoff algorithm” however that rumors circulating amongst staff “seem to match what we see round us as a attainable sample.” She added: “there should be some system/algorithm if you’re shedding 30k folks.”
On office boards like Blind and TheLayoff.com, different former staff echoed related suspicions, with some reporting they had been reduce shortly earlier than upcoming vesting dates (7, 8). Oracle senior supervisor Michael Shepherd wrote publicly on LinkedIn that the layoffs had been “not efficiency primarily based” (9).
Oracle declined to remark when contacted by Moneywise.
Oracle posted a 95% internet earnings soar final quarter to $6.13 billion (10), and its remaining efficiency obligations — contracted future income — hit $130 billion in Q3, with complete RPO reaching $553 billion (11). However the firm is spending aggressively on AI infrastructure, with $50 billion in capital expenditure deliberate for this fiscal 12 months, and has taken on greater than $100 billion in debt to fund the buildout (12). TD Cowen estimated the layoffs might release $8 to $10 billion in money stream. The inventory is buying and selling round $138 as of mid-April, down roughly 58% from its September 2025 all-time closing excessive of $325.76 (13).
Throughout the identical interval, Oracle filed roughly 3,100 H-1B visa petitions throughout federal fiscal years 2025 and 2026 — together with 436 in fiscal 12 months 2026 alone — in line with information from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Companies (14). The H-1B program permits corporations to briefly rent overseas employees with specialised abilities for U.S.-based roles. Oracle has not commented on the visa filings.
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SEC Kind 8-Ok (1); Oracle (2); CFO Dive (3); Bloomberg Intelligence (4); The Subsequent Internet (5); LinkedIn (6); Blind (7); TheLayoff.com (8); Barchart (9); CNBC (10, 11); Fortune (12); Yahoo Finance (13); IBTimes (14)
This text initially appeared on Moneywise.com underneath the title: Oracle’s new CFO got $26M in stock after layoffs. Employee says an ‘algorithm’ targeted workers with stock options first
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