Key points
- An Oracle director bought $3.48 million of stock
- The purchase wasn't reported under a 10b5-1 plan
- The purchase added to a small reported shareholding
- The buy came days after Oracle's debt protection hit a record price
Oracle (ORCL) director Stephen Rusckowski bought 25,000 shares for about $3.48 million on Tuesday, Sept. 29, according to a Form 4 filed Thursday. He joined the board last November.
I spotted the purchase on our insider-buying tracker. What caught my attention was the timing: just five days earlier, the cost of insuring Oracle's debt had hit a record.
What the filing shows
The filing reports the transaction under code P, which covers open-market or private purchases, rather than a stock award or option exercise. The Rule 10b5-1 checkbox is unchecked, so the purchase was not reported as being made under such a trading plan.
He paid a weighted average of $139.352 a share. A footnote says the order "was executed in multiple trades at prices ranging from $138.96 to $139.74." The shares went into The Stephen H. Rusckowski Living Trust, which now holds 25,390 shares, and he holds another 60 directly.
Here's the part I kept coming back to. If the trust holds 25,390 shares after buying 25,000, it held only 390 before, by our arithmetic. So the trust went from a few hundred shares to more than 25,000 in one day. That calculation describes the trust's shares, not necessarily his total Oracle equity exposure.
Who is Stephen Rusckowski?
He ran Quest Diagnostics (DGX) as chief executive from 2012 to 2022, and before that he was chief executive of Philips Healthcare. Oracle named him to the board effective Nov. 18, 2025, and Chairman Larry Ellison said his healthcare background would help the board think about how Oracle Health can better serve patients and providers. He sits on the board's compensation committee and is up for election at Oracle's annual meeting on Nov. 18.
Why Oracle's debt matters here
Oracle is borrowing heavily to build data centers for AI customers, and the credit market has been pushing back. Its five-year credit default swap spread, the price of insurance against an Oracle default, hit a record 227.15 basis points on Sept. 24. A higher spread means investors see more risk.
The worry shows up in a few places. About $18 billion of loans financing an Oracle data center in New Mexico were quoted at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar in September as the banks struggled to sell them. Oracle reported negative free cash flow of $5.4 billion for the quarter that ended Aug. 31, after spending $28.5 billion on capital projects. Its borrowings were carried at $125 billion on Aug. 31, and Oracle put their fair value at $105.7 billion, as we laid out when we compared its debt with CoreWeave's.
Oracle closed Thursday at $138.07, slightly below Rusckowski's purchase price and about 60% below its September 2025 high.
How unusual is a buy like this?
At Oracle, fairly unusual lately. Every other Oracle insider trade we logged in September was a sale. Two came from Michael Sicilia under a pre-arranged trading plan, and one came from Maria Smith.
Does one director's buy tell you the stock is cheap? Not on its own. Insider purchases are a cleaner signal than sales, since people sell for all kinds of reasons, but the research on following them is mixed. I went through it in a separate piece.
What the filing doesn't tell you
A Form 4 gives the date, the size, the price and whether a plan was involved. It doesn't give a reason. Rusckowski's filing doesn't say why he bought, whether Oracle's stock ownership guidelines for directors played a part, or whether he plans to buy more. The purchase lines up with a low price and a stretch of bad debt headlines, but the form leaves that connection unstated.
Every Oracle filing lands on its stock page as it arrives, and this purchase sits on our insider-buying tracker, where I found it. This is general information, not investment advice.
