Oracle's Larry Ellison adopts trading plan to sell up to $7.5 billion worth of stock

JUST IN: Oracle founder Larry Ellison, the world's seventh-richest person, adopts a trading plan to sell up to $7.5 billion of stock, covering as many as 50 million shares.

Larry Ellison just filed to sell seven and a half billion dollars of Oracle stock. Fifty million shares, the biggest sale he's ever put on the books.

Here's the man himself. He founded Oracle in 1977 and he has been famously glued to it ever since. Since the year 2000 he's never sold more than twenty five thousand shares at once. Now the plan runs through October 24, and even if he sells every last share in it, he still keeps 1.1 billion of them and control of over 40 percent of the company.

The timing is what gets me. Oracle just posted 121 percent growth in cloud infrastructure, but the stock is down about 20 percent this year and analysts keep circling the debt pile. Listen to Jefferies on where institutional money stands.

So the founder who never sells is suddenly selling billions, right as investors are asking hard questions about the balance sheet. He's 82, and he's reading his own company somehow. The rest of us just get to watch the filings.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.