Oracle plans to pay newly appointed President Mark Hurd a base salary of $950,000 a year. The company also says the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, who was ousted by that company last month, is eligible for a fiscal 2011 bonus of as much as $10 million.
Oracle released the details of Hurd's pay package in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.
But the biggest part of Hurd's pay package will be the 10 million stock options Oracle plans to give him. The company said Hurd's options will carry an exercise price equal to the market value of the shares on the date they are granted. While the filing did not offer a specific date, Oracle shares closed Tuesday at $24.26, which would value 10 million shares at $242.6 million. If he stays with the company, Hurd will be given options to buy another 5 million shares each year for the next five years.
Hurd's future at Oracle was complicated Tuesday when Hewlett-Packard sued Hurd to keep him out of his new job. HP is worried Hurd will use his knowledge of the company to give Oracle an unfair advantage. Lawsuits of that kind often end with a court ordering an executive to avoid certain parts of their employers' businesses.
Hurd resigned from HP last month after five years as the company's CEO. An investigation uncovered inaccurate expense reports related to Hurd's outings with an actress and HP contractor named Jodie Fisher, who claimed that her work at HP dried up after she rebuffed Hurd's advances.
Hurd's move to Oracle has injected new frictiion into Oracle's relationship with HP. The two companies have cooperated for years, with HP selling corporate servers and Oracle providing the software that helps organize the information stored on them. But Oracle, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., moved into direct competition with HP in the hardware business when it bought Sun Microsystemsfor $7.4 billion last year.