Days after Oracle laid off 30,000 employees via 6 a.m. email (as Moneywise previously reported), the company announced its next big move: hiring a new CFO with a $26 million stock package.
Meanwhile, some laid-off workers have raised questions on LinkedIn and job forums about how Oracle chose who to lay off; one 30-year veteran suggested the company could have targeted employees with outstanding stock options.
On April 6, Oracle filed a Form 8-K with the SEC announcing Hilary Maxson as its new chief financial officer, effective immediately (1). Maxson, 48, previously served as executive vice president and group chief financial officer at Schneider Electric, a global energy management company with more than $45 billion in annual revenue (2). Prior to Schneider, he spent 12 years at AES Corporation in senior finance, strategy and M&A roles (3).
His compensation package from Oracle, according to the SEC filing, includes an annual base salary of $950,000 and eligibility for a performance-based bonus with a target of $2.5 million, prorated through the end of Oracle’s fiscal year on May 31. Oracle also agreed to cover up to $250,000 of its relocation costs for 12 months.
Maxson will receive a grant valued at $26 million under Oracle’s amended and restated 2020 Equity Incentive Plan: 80% time-based ($20.8 million) and 20% performance-based ($5.2 million). She can choose whether to take that as 100% stock options or a 50/50 split of options and restricted stock units. The time-based portion is awarded over four years on an anticipated schedule: 40% after the first year, 30% after the second year, 20% after the third year, and 10% after the fourth year. Performance capital is vested over a three-year period ending May 31, 2028, tied to revenue metrics.
Maxson reports to CEO Clay Magouyrk. Her appointment reinstates Oracle’s CFO title for the first time since 2014, when Safra Catz assumed the CEO and CFO roles. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana noted in a research note that hiring a CFO from an industrial company indicates that Oracle’s priority is infrastructure development, not databases or applications (4).
Under Oracle’s severance terms, employees who were laid off had their unvested restricted stock units forfeited immediately after the termination. The purchased shares remained accessible through Fidelity (5).
Nina Lewis, a security alerts manager who spent more than 30 years at Oracle, posted on LinkedIn that the layoffs appeared to “follow an algorithm of high-level individual contributors and mid-level managers, especially those with outstanding stock options.” The post got more than 2,000 likes (6).
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Lewis later clarified in a follow-up post that he had “NO specific internal knowledge of any layoff algorithm,” but that rumors circulating among employees “seem to match what we see around us as a possible pattern.” He added: “There must be some system/algorithm if you’re laying off 30,000 people.”
On labor forums such as Blind and TheLayoff.com, other former employees echoed similar suspicions, with some reporting that they were fired shortly before their upcoming vesting dates (7, 8). Oracle senior manager Michael Shepherd wrote publicly on LinkedIn that the layoffs were “not performance-based” (9).
Oracle declined to comment when contacted by Moneywise.
Oracle posted a 95% increase in net revenue last quarter to $6.13 billion (10), and its remaining performance obligations (contracted future revenue) reached $130 billion in the third quarter, with total RPO reaching $553 billion (11). But the company is spending aggressively on AI infrastructure, with $50 billion in capital expenditures planned for this fiscal year, and has taken on more than $100 billion in debt to finance construction (12). TD Cowen estimated that the layoffs could free up between $8 billion and $10 billion in cash flow. The stock is trading around $138 in mid-April, about 58% off its September 2025 all-time closing high of $325.76 (13).
During the same period, Oracle filed approximately 3,100 H-1B visa petitions during federal fiscal years 2025 and 2026, including 436 in fiscal year 2026 alone, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (14). The H-1B program allows companies to temporarily hire foreign workers with specialized skills for positions in the United States. Oracle has not commented on the visa applications.
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SEC Form 8-K (1); Oracle (2); CFO Dive (3); Bloomberg Intelligence (4); The next web (5); LinkedIn (6); Blind (7); TheLayoff.com (8); bar graph (9); CNBC (10, 11); Fortune (12); Yahoo Finance (13); IBTimes (14)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com with the title: Oracle’s new CFO netted $26 million in stock after layoffs. Employee says ‘algorithm’ first targeted workers with stock options
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