Oracle execs bragged about car collections while refusing to raise pay: report

Tone-deaf executives in Oracle’s struggling advertising unit reportedly bragged about their car collections during the same 2020 meeting in which they dismissed employees’ gripes about pay.

Former employees at the software giant headed by billionaire Larry Ellison said that “out of touch” executives at Oracle Advertising contributed to the trouble as the company struggled to keep pace with marketing cloud competitors Salesforce and Adobe in recent years, the report said.

The ex-Oracle workers described a 2020 all-hands meeting in which Stevan Vlaović was first introduced as the advertising division’s new head of engineering.

During the meeting, workers were “dismayed” when Vlaović allegedly downplayed their concerns about a lack of pay raises as “hyperbole,” Insider reported.

Just minutes later in the same meeting, Vlaović and fellow executive Derek Wise purportedly shocked employees by openly discussing their car collections, ex-employees told the outlet. Vlaović revealed that he owned seven cars, while Wise talked about his affection for racing cars and said he owned an Aston Martin.

“There was a real arrogance that seemed not to have been present before,” one former worker, who was recently laid off by Oracle, told Insider.

A second former employee who was also recently laid off described the phone call as “legitimately a car crash” that became a “running joke” among the division’s staffers.

Workers said the mood within the division changed following the departure of popular executive Eric Roza in 2019. The disconnect between the new leadership and employees purportedly contributed to a worsening morale problem.

The Post has reached out to Oracle for comment on the report.

The Insider report detailed mounting discord at Oracle as executives scrambled to integrate marketing and advertising divisions into one product offering that would appeal to corporate clients.

The former employees said Oracle did not sufficiently invest in either its Marketing Cloud or Advertising divisions, while competing services offered by Salesforce and Adobe steadily pulled ahead.

Oracle laid off hundreds of employees earlier this month, with most of the cuts impacting workers in its advertising and customer experience divisions, according to the Wall Street Journal.