Billionaire Larry Ellison Just Paid His Co-CEO 6,623x The Average Oracle Worker — And It Changes Everything For Founders Who Think Hiring Is the Answer
Billionaire Larry Ellison Just Paid His Co-CEO 6,623x The Average Oracle Worker — And It Changes Everything For Founders Who Think Hiring Is the Answer
Part 1 — The Hook
Larry Ellison just handed his Co-CEO $627 million — and every single dollar is now worthless on paper. Oracle's proxy filing, published late September 2026 and reported by Forbes and Fortune, revealed Co-CEO Magouyrk earned 6,623 times the pay of the company's median worker. The options are underwater. The stock is down 53%. And roughly 21,000 Oracle employees were laid off while the packages were being signed. Most founders read this story and think it is about executive greed. They are wrong. This story is about what happens when you pay for talent before you build the system that makes talent worth paying for.
Part 2 — The Press
You do not run a $175 billion company. You run a startup with a team of 5, 10, maybe 20 people. But you are making the exact same mistake Larry Ellison just made — and you are making it at a scale that will quietly kill your business before anyone writes a Forbes headline about it.
Every month, startup founders across Singapore, KL, Manila, Jakarta, and beyond are hiring salespeople they cannot afford, handing out commissions they cannot sustain, and waiting for results that never arrive. They justify it the way Oracle's compensation committee did: they needed proven talent in a competitive market. And every month, those same founders watch their runway shrink while their new hire learns on the job — using the founder's money as tuition.
Here is the truth that stings: a talented salesperson inside a broken system will underperform a mediocre salesperson inside a great system. Every time. When you hire before you build, you are not buying results. You are buying hope. And hope has a terrible ROI.
Part 3 — The Play
In late September 2026, Fortune reported that Oracle's proxy filing disclosed a combined grant-date value of $988 million in stock options awarded to co-founder Larry Ellison and newly appointed co-CEOs Magouyrk and Sicilia in fiscal 2026 (Fortune, Sep 26, 2026). By the time the fiscal year ended on May 31, every one of those options was underwater — with no intrinsic value at fiscal year end.
The numbers are staggering. Magouyrk's total reported compensation reached $627.5 million — 6,623 times the median Oracle employee pay of $94,740 (Forbes, Sep 28, 2026). His fellow Co-CEO Sicilia earned 2,709 times median pay. Oracle's stock closed at $137 on September 26, down 53% over the prior 12 months. The company also eliminated roughly 21,000 jobs during fiscal 2026, about 13% of its global workforce.
Oracle's operating results were strong: revenue rose 17% to $67.4 billion, cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 77% to $18.1 billion, and remaining performance obligations reached $638 billion. The business grew. The market did not care. The compensation packages designed to incentivise performance delivered nothing — because the options vested into a stock price already collapsing under the weight of $55.7 billion in capital expenditure (Fortune, Sep 26, 2026).
Billionaire Larry Ellison's move is one Jason has seen replicated across 1,000+ founders. Here is what most miss.
Part 4 — The Lesson and Root Cause Reframe
Beat 1 — Root Cause Reframe
Most founders think the problem is that they do not have the right people selling. So they hire. They promote. They recruit. They pay more. And nothing changes.
The real problem is that they do not have a selling system — and they are using compensation packages to cover for the absence of one.
Oracle did not fail because it hired the wrong people. Magouyrk and Sicilia are genuinely accomplished executives. The compensation committee cited the exceptionally competitive market for proven cloud and AI leaders as justification for the packages (Forbes, Sep 28, 2026). The problem is that no amount of talent can compensate for a business model burning $55.7 billion in capex while the stock collapses under the weight of investor uncertainty. The system was broken. The salaries could not fix it.
Startup founders make a scaled-down version of this mistake every week. They hire a great salesperson at $8,000 or $10,000 a month before they have a proven sales process. They pay a commission structure before they know what their average deal value or sales cycle actually looks like. They build a team before they have built a system. And then they watch results fail to materialise — and conclude they need to hire someone even better.
Beat 2 — The Lesson
A team without a selling system is not a sales team — it is a salary list.
The lesson is not that you should pay your team less. The lesson is that the system must come first. A repeatable, teachable, measurable sales process is what makes a compensation package worth paying. Without it, you are not incentivising performance — you are subsidising activity. And activity without direction is just expensive noise.
Founder Story Card
Jeffrey Teo — 63 Customers in 100 Days
Jeffrey was pitching hard and hiring fast — but his pipeline was inconsistent and his close rate was unpredictable. He did not need a better salesperson. He needed a system. After installing the Future of Selling System, he enrolled 63 customers in 100 days without adding a single new hire. The system was the multiplier. The team just executed it.
Part 5 — The Opportunity and Conditions
Beat 1 — The Hidden Opportunity
Oracle's situation creates a specific, time-sensitive opening for every founder watching this story unfold. The moment when a category leader overpays for talent and underperforms on results is the moment the market reassesses what good actually looks like. Right now, enterprise buyers — the same buyers your startup is pitching — are watching tech giants burn cash, cut staff, and deliver underwhelming returns. They are becoming more sceptical. More cautious. More resistant to big promises from big brands.
That scepticism is your opening. When the market trusts brands less, it trusts people more. A founder with a structured, repeatable sales process who can demonstrate results, articulate value clearly, and follow through on every commitment will outperform the enterprise sales rep from a recognised brand. Every time. The only question is whether you have the system to take advantage of the window — or whether you are still waiting to hire someone who might.
Are you ready to build before you spend? Check all that apply:
✅ Condition 1: You have the Future of Selling System as your sales foundation.
Before you hire anyone to sell, you need a proven, teachable system they can operate within. The Future of Selling System at dreamaker.club/buyfos is the prerequisite that actually moves the needle — because it defines how deals get closed, not just who closes them.
✅ Condition 2: You know your revenue-per-salesperson metric before hiring.
If you cannot calculate how much revenue your current process generates per seller, you have no baseline to judge a new hire's performance. Know your number before you write the offer letter.
✅ Condition 3: You can close deals yourself before delegating closing to others.
If you cannot personally walk a prospect through the full sales process and close them, you cannot train anyone else to do it. Founders who cannot sell should not yet be hiring sellers — they should be getting the system first.
✅ Condition 4: Your comp structure rewards system execution, not just activity.
Activity metrics — calls made, emails sent, meetings booked — are inputs, not outcomes. Before you build a commission plan, build the system that tells you what good execution looks like at every stage of the deal.
NEW!
September 2026
Dear Founders,
If you are paying people to sell before you have a selling system, you are not building a sales team — you are funding a very expensive experiment. And the results will disappoint you every time.
I know how that feels. I felt it too. When I first started scaling a team, I thought the answer was always the next hire, the next commission tweak, the next better salesperson. I found that no hire ever fixed a broken process — but the right system made every hire dramatically more effective.
You are not alone. According to the Salesforce State of Sales Report, 76% of sales reps say they are overwhelmed by the number of tools they use — and still miss quota. The problem is not the people. It is the absence of a system they can actually follow.
The Future of Selling System has been used by 1,000+ founders since 2015, generating $22M+ in combined graduate sales. Jeffrey Teo enrolled 63 customers in 100 days. Stanley Tan closed 45 buyers in 3 hours. Leon unlocked a $2M partnership. These are not anomalies — they are what happens when you have a system before you have a team.
Not ready for $19? Start free.
The Objection Playbook: 25 Word-for-Word Scripts to Close More Sales
The exact words Jason's founders use when a buyer says too expensive, send me info or I need to think about it. Free PDF, sent to your inbox.
Send Me the 25 ScriptsLarry Ellison already moved — he just built the wrong system before paying for the team. The only question is whether you will build the right one first, or whether you will read about someone else who did.
