Oracle's Billionaire CEO Gets $84.5M Pay Package

Oracle Corp.'s billionaire CEO Larry Ellison padded his fortune with a fiscal 2009 pay package the company valued at $84.5 million, down about $100,000 from the year before and made up mostly of stock options that haven't vested yet.

On top of that, Ellison made $124.2 million by exercising 10 million stock options during the latest fiscal year, which ended May 31, according to the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company's annual proxy filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

He took home far more from cashing out stock options the year before. Oracle's stock price was significantly lower in the 2009 fiscal year because of the financial crisis, and Ellison cashed out fewer of options during the period than he did in the previous year. Ellison made $543.8 million exercising 36 million options in fiscal 2008.

According to calculations by The Associated Press, Oracle gave Ellison a compensation package valued at $84.6 million last year.

There was a penalty for the business software maker's performance. Oracle said in the filing that because the company didn't meet its "difficult" internal target for pretax profit in the latest fiscal year that Ellison and other top executives got only 40 percent of their target bonuses.

Still, Ellison, the world's fourth-wealthiest person as ranked by Forbes magazine, was rewarded richly for a year in which Oracle's sales grew 4 percent to $23.3 billion and profit ticked up 1 percent to $5.6 billion.

Oracle is the world's leading database software seller, and has been aggressively expanding into other business software markets. In April it agreed to buy struggling server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion, a deal that cleared antitrust hurdles in the U.S. this week and is awaiting approval from European regulators.

Ellison's salary remained unchanged at $1 million. For the current fiscal year, though, he agreed to cut his annual salary to $1, joining other Silicon Valley stars like Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs and Google Inc. co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who also make a buck a year in salary. They all have a large part of their fortunes tied up in big ownership stakes in their companies.