Oracle has hired Hilary Maxson as its new chief financial officer with a compensation package that includes $26 million in stock grants — an announcement that landed just days after the company laid off up to 30,000 employees via early-morning emails. The jarring timing has drawn scrutiny from former workers and industry observers alike.
Maxson, 48, joins Oracle from Schneider Electric, where she served as executive vice president and group CFO of the $45 billion energy management company. Her package includes a $950,000 base salary, a performance bonus targeting $2.5 million, and up to $250,000 in relocation costs. The $26 million equity grant is split 80% time-based and 20% performance-based, with the time-based portion vesting on a front-loaded four-year schedule.
Her appointment reinstates the CFO title at Oracle for the first time since 2014, when Safra Catz assumed both CEO and principal financial officer duties. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana noted that hiring a CFO from an industrial company signals Oracle's priority is infrastructure buildout — not its legacy database and applications business. That focus aligns with Oracle's role in the Stargate AI data center project in Abilene, Texas, a collaboration with OpenAI and SoftBank that has received promotional support from President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, some of the thousands of laid-off workers have raised pointed questions about how Oracle selected employees for termination. On LinkedIn and workplace forums, one 30-year veteran suggested the company may have used an algorithm that targeted workers holding outstanding stock options — a claim that, if true, could carry legal implications. Oracle has not publicly addressed the allegation.
The contrast between a multimillion-dollar hiring package and mass layoffs is not unusual in corporate America, but the compressed timeline has made it especially stark. For investors, the move reflects Oracle's bet that its future lies in AI infrastructure rather than traditional enterprise software — a pivot that requires new leadership even as the human cost of restructuring remains raw.