Larry Ellison's Pay Cut By 15% In Final Year As Oracle Corp. CEO

Oracle Corp. paid Larry Ellison $67.3 million over the course of his final full year as its CEO, a position he stepped away from last week. The salary, which mostly consisted of stock options, was a 15.5 percent drop from a year earlier, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing earlier this week. Ellison will also receive 750,000 fewer shares for the 2015 fiscal year.

Ellison, who co-founded Oracle nearly 40 years ago in Santa Clara, California, still owns one-quarter of the company. The 70-year-old -- who earned $79.6 million, mostly in stock options, in fiscal 2013 -- will remain as Oracle's executive chairman and chief technology officer. The announcement that he would no longer serve as Oracle's CEO surprised Wall Street observers last week.

In the fiscal year ended May 31, he collected a salary of $1, as he has since 2011.

The new co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, both longtime company executives, received 500,000 options each last week when they succeeded Ellison. Both Catz and Hurd are guaranteed 562,500 in performance-based stock. They are also eligible for performance-based bonuses of 125,000 shares each.

Investors have complained about Ellison’s pay package, maintaining that he was taking home too much money while the company he led struggled against smaller competitors. A majority of shareholders opposed Ellison’s pay in a non-binding vote last year, according to Reuters.

“Careful scrutiny and caution are warranted because we’re still looking at awards with huge economic value,” Michael Pryce-Jones, an analyst at Washington-based CtW Investment Group, which advises union pension funds and has criticized Ellison’s pay, told Reuters. “You’ve got Catz and Hurd on a huge number and Ellison hasn’t taken a huge dip either.”