Apr 11, 2026
Days after Oracle fired up to 30,000 employees via a 6 a.m. email — as Moneywise previously reported — the company announced its next big move: hiring a new chief financial officer with a $26 million stock package.
Meanwhile, some laid-off workers have raised questions on LinkedIn and workplace forums about how Oracle chose who to cut — with one 30-year veteran suggesting the company may have targeted employees with outstanding stock options.
The new CFO's deal
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 CFO at Schneider Electric, a global energy management company with more than $45 billion in annual revenue (2). Before Schneider, she spent 12 years at the AES Corporation in senior finance, strategy and M&A roles (3).
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Her Oracle compensation package, per the SEC filing, includes an annual base salary of $950,000 and eligibility for a performance-based bonus targeting $2.5 million, prorated through Oracle's fiscal year-end on May 31. Oracle also agreed to cover up to $250,000 of her relocation costs over 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 gets to choose whether to take that as 100% stock options or a 50/50 split of options and restricted stock units. The time-based portion vests over four years on a front-loaded schedule: 40% after year one, 30% after year two, 20% after year three and 10% after year four. The performance equity vests over a three-year period ending May 31, 2028, tied to revenue metrics.
Maxson reports to CEO Clay Magouyrk. Her appointment reinstates the CFO title at Oracle for the first time since 2014, when Safra Catz took on both the CEO and principal financial officer roles. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana noted in a research note that hiring a CFO from an industrial company signals Oracle's priority is infrastructure buildout — not databases or applications (4).
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'Especially those with outstanding stock options'
Under Oracle's severance terms, employees who were cut had their unvested restricted stock units forfeited immediately upon termination. Vested stock remained accessible through Fidelity (5).
Nina Lewis, a security alert 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 drew more than 2,000 likes (6).
Lewis later clarified in a follow-up post that she had "NO specific inside knowledge of any layoff algorithm" but that rumors circulating among employees "appear to match what we see around us as a possible pattern." She added: "there must be some system/algorithm if you are laying off 30k people."
On workplace forums like Blind and TheLayoff.com, other former employees echoed similar suspicions, with some reporting they were cut shortly before 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.
Debt, AI spending and a falling stock
Oracle posted a 95% net income jump last quarter to $6.13 billion (10), and its remaining performance obligations — contracted future revenue — hit $130 billion in Q3, with total RPO reaching $553 billion (11). But the company is spending aggressively on AI infrastructure, with $50 billion in capital expenditure planned for this fiscal year, and has taken on more than $100 billion in debt to fund the buildout (12). TD Cowen estimated the layoffs could free up $8 to $10 billion in cash flow. The stock is trading around $138 as of mid-April, down roughly 58% from its September 2025 all-time closing high of $325.76 (13).
During the same period, Oracle filed approximately 3,100 H-1B visa petitions across 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 U.S.-based roles. Oracle has not commented on the visa filings.
Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
SEC Form 8-K (1); Oracle (2); CFO Dive (3); Bloomberg Intelligence (4); The Next Web (5); LinkedIn (6); Blind (7); TheLayoff.com (8); Barchart (9); CNBC (10, 11); Fortune (12); Yahoo Finance (13); IBTimes (14)
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Rudro is an Editor with Moneywise. His work has appeared on Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and The Financial Post. He previously served as Managing Editor of Oola, and as the Content Lead of Tickld before that. Rudro holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Toronto.
