Bloomberg reported on September 11 that Oracle earnings calls this year have been missing Larry Ellison. He founded the company, kept the public face after he gave up the chief executive title in 2014, and used those calls to argue about databases, applications, and whoever sat across from him that quarter. One of the few earlier absences was a yacht race. The Next Web followed on September 12 and said he is not on the keynote billing for Oracle AI World, October 25 to 28 at the Venetian in Las Vegas (Bloomberg, 2026; The Next Web, 2026).

He is still chairman and chief technology officer. Coverage puts his holding near 40 percent of the stock. A person close to him told the Financial Times he remains active in day-to-day decisions. The microphone moved. The ownership did not.

The two chief executives were named last September and now do the explaining

Oracle promoted Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to chief executive officers on September 22, 2025. Safra Catz moved to executive vice chair. Magouyrk joined in 2014 from Amazon Web Services and built Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including the European sovereign regions in Frankfurt and Madrid that have run since June 2023 on separate European Union legal entities. Sicilia came in through Primavera and ran industry applications, including the rebuilt Oracle Health stack. Their joint statement said they would lead Oracle into the artificial intelligence era with cloud infrastructure and applications together (Oracle, 2025).

That split matches the company customers now buy. One seat sells capacity, power, and isolated regions. The other seat sells Fusion applications and industry suites that sit on that capacity. Ellison spent decades selling databases and packaged software in public. The product that needs explaining on an earnings call in 2026 is rented compute for model training, plus agents inside finance and operations applications. Magouyrk and Sicilia built those lines. They are the people who can answer the follow-up.

A company this large rarely changes who speaks for it this fast. Oracle did it while the founder kept 40 percent and the technology title.

On Saturday Oracle said Ellison had cancelled a trading plan that would have let him sell as many as 50 million shares, about $7.5 billion at Friday's close. No shares sold under that plan, and the company said he has no other plan to sell. The Financial Times put that reversal next to investor worry about the cost of the data-center build (Financial Times, 2026). Treat the cancelled sale as a holding decision, not as proof he left the building.

NetSuite was the product I could not get data out of

Oracle agreed to buy NetSuite on July 28, 2016 for about $9.3 billion, or $109 a share in cash, and closed the deal that November. Mark Hurd said the two application lines would coexist. I used NetSuite after that purchase. The work that stalled was not the screen in front of the finance user. It was getting those records into the other systems the company already ran. Exports, mappings, and the wait for a clean file were the job.

That is the customer test I still apply when Oracle talks about Fusion agents and NetSuite Next. An agent that drafts a close or a payment only helps if the numbers can leave the suite and land in the warehouse, the bank file, or the other application without a project. I sit in Oracle briefings and I have been waiting for those Fusion artificial intelligence announcements to show up as work inside the applications, not as a count of workspaces. In April I wrote that 22 agentic workspaces was the wrong number to stare at (Oracle Built 22 Agentic Workspaces).

Oracle says an AI Agent Accelerator will appear at AI World in October. NetSuite Next is in general availability, and the NetSuite AI Connector Service lets a customer attach NetSuite data to assistants they already use. Those are the product facts to take into Las Vegas. Whether a mid-market finance team can move a ledger extract without another integration stack is the question I will ask again there.

Founders at Google and Zoho left the public job to work the product

Sergey Brin stepped down as Alphabet president in 2019. Coverage this month says he is back in a Mountain View building working on Gemini, with no executive title, after he returned to the code during the model race (The Next Web, 2026). Sridhar Vembu left the chief executive job at Zoho on January 27, 2025 and took the chief scientist seat so he could spend his time on research. Shailesh Kumar Davey became group chief executive.

Ellison's move is the third version of that pattern, not a copy of either one. He kept chairman and chief technology officer. He left the quarterly theater. My read is that he wants the hours for the next product height in a cycle that is moving faster than Oracle's old cadence. A company this size usually argues with itself for years before it lets operators speak. Oracle named those operators and then got out of their way on the call.

I wrote in June about Oracle's data-center design answers on power and water as towns pushed back on permits (Power and Water Are Where AI Infrastructure Stalls). That build is now the business Magouyrk has to explain without Ellison on the line. Sicilia has to show that Fusion and NetSuite agents close books and move goods, not only generate text inside a workspace. Those are buyer questions. The founder leaving the call does not answer them. It does tell you who Oracle expects to answer them.

About Shashi Bellamkonda

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