You can’t avoid Oracle.

No, really, you can’t. Oracle is everywhere. It sells ERP software – enterprise resource planning, which is a rat king of different services for giant companies for financial services, procurement (IE: sourcing and organizing the goods your company needs to run), compliance, project management, and human resources. It sells database software, and even owns the programming language Java as part of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems back in 2010. 

Its customers are fucking everyone: hospitals (such as England’s National Health Service), large corporations (like Microsoft), health insurance companies, Walmart, and multiple different governments. Even if you have never even heard of Oracle before, it’s almost entirely certain that your personal data is sitting in an Oracle-designed system somewhere. 

Once you let Oracle into your house, it never leaves. Canceling contracts is difficult, to the point that one Redditor notes that some clients agreed to spend a minimum amount of money on services without realizing, meaning that you can’t remove services you don’t need even during the renewal of a contract. One user from three years ago told the story of adding two users to their contract for Oracle’s Netsuite Starter Edition (around $1000 a month in today’s pricing), only for an Oracle account manager to call a day later to demand they upgrade to the more expensive package ($2500 per month) for every user. 

In a thread from a year ago, another user asked for help renegotiating their contract for Netsuite, adding that “[their] company is no where near the state needed to begin an implementation” and “would use a third party partner to implement” software that they had been sold by Oracle. One user responded by saying that Oracle would play hardball and “may even use [the] threat of attorneys.” 

In fact, there are entire websites about negotiations with Oracle, with Palisade Compliance saying that “Oracle likes a frenetic pace where contracts are reviewed and dialogues happen under the constant pressure of Oracle’s quarter closes,” describing negotiations with them as “often rushed, filled with tension, and littered with threats from aggressive sales and Oracle auditing personnel.” This is something you can only do when you’ve made it so incredibly difficult to change providers. What’re you gonna do? Have your entire database not work? Pay up.

Oracle also likes to do “audits” of big customers where it makes sure that every single part of your organization that uses Oracle software is paying for it, or were not using it in a way that was not allowed based on their contract. For example, Oracle sued healthcare IT company Perry Johnson & Associates in 2020 because the company that built PJ&A’s database systems used Oracle’s database software. The case was settled.

This is all to say that Oracle is a big company that sells lots of stuff, and increases the pressure around its quarterly earnings as a means of boosting revenues. If you have a company with computers that might be running Java or Oracle’s software — even if somebody else installed it for you! — you’ll be paying Oracle, one way or another. They even tried to sue Google for using the open source version of Java to build its Android operating system (though they lost). 

Oracle is a huge, inevitable pain in the ass, and, for the most part, an incredibly profitable one. Every time a new customer signs on at Oracle, they pledge themselves to the Graveyard Smash and permanent fealty to Larry Ellison’s database empire. 

As a result, founder Larry Ellison has become one of the richest people in the world — the fifth-largest as of writing this sentence — owning 40% of Oracle’s stock and, per Martin Peers of The Information, will earn about $2.3 billion in dividends in the next year. 

Oracle has also done well to stay out of bullshit hype-cycles. While it quickly spun up vague blockchain and metaverse offerings, its capex stayed relatively flat at around $1 billion to $2.1 billion a fiscal year (which runs from June 1 to May 31), until it burst to $4.511 in FY2022 (which began on June 1, 2021, for reference), $8.695 billion in FY2023, $6.86 billion in FY2024, and then increasing a teeny little bit to $21.25 billion in FY2025 as it stocked up on AI GPUs and started selling compute.

You may be wondering if that helped at all, and it doesn’t appear to have at all. Oracle’s net income has stayed in the $2 billion to $3 billion range for over a decade, other than a $2.7 billion spike last quarter from its sale of its shares in Ampere.

You see, things have gotten weird at Oracle, in part because of the weirdness of the Ellisons themselves, and their cozy relationship with the Trump Administration (and Trump itself). Ellison’s massive wealth backed son David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount, putting conservative Bari Weiss at the helm of CBS in an attempt to placate and empower the right wing, and is currently trying to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (though it appears Netflix may have won), all in pursuit of kissing up to a regime steeped in brutality and bigotry that killed two people in Minnesota.

As part of the media blitz, the Ellisons also took part in the acquisition of TikTok, and last week established a joint venture that owns TikTok’s US operations, with Oracle owning 15% of the new company (along with VC Silverlake and the UAE’s MGXs fund). Per TechCrunch:

Oracle will serve as the trusted security partner, responsible for auditing and ensuring compliance with National Security Terms, according to a memo. The company already provides cloud services for TikTok and manages user data in the U.S. Notably, Oracle previously made a bid for TikTok back in 2020.

I know that you’re likely a little scared that an ultra right-wing billionaire has bought another major social network. I know you think that Oracle, a massive and inevitable cloud storage platform owned by a man who looks like H.R. Giger drew Jerry Stiller. I know you’re likely worried about a replay of the Elon Musk Twitter fiasco, where every week it seemed like things would collapse but it never seemed to happen, and then Musk bought an election.

What if I told you that things were very different, and far more existentially perilous for Oracle?

Oracle Is Burning Billions of Dollars, Threatening Its Future and Larry Ellison’s Fortune

You see, Oracle is arguably one of the single-most evil and successful companies in the world, and it’s got there by being an aggressive vendor of database and ERP software, one that, like a tick with a law degree, cannot be removed without some degree of bloodshed. Perhaps not the highest-margin business in the world, but you know, it worked.

Oracle has stuck to the things it’s known for for years and years and done just fine…

…until AI, that is. Let’s see what AI has done for Oracle’s gross margi-OH MY GOD!

The scourge of AI GPUs has taken Oracle’s gross margin from around 79% in 2021 to 68.54% in 2025, with CNBC reporting that FactSet-polled analysts saw it falling to 49% by 2030, which I think is actually being a little optimistic.  

Oracle was very early to high-performance computing, becoming the first cloud in the world to have general availability of NVIDIA’s A100 GPUs back in September 2020, and in June 2023 (at the beginning of Oracle’s FY2024), Ellison declared that Oracle would spend “billions” on NVIDIA GPUs, naming AI firm Cohere as one of its customers. 

In May 2024, Musk and Ellison discussed a massive cloud compute contract — a multi-year, $10 billion deal that fell apart in July 2024 when Musk got impatient, a blow that was softened by Microsoft’s deal to buy compute capacity for OpenAI, for chips to be rented out of a data center in Abilene Texas that, about six months later, OpenAI would claim was part of a “$500 billion Stargate initiative” announcement between Oracle, SoftBank and OpenAI that was so rushed that Ellison had to borrow a coat to stay warm on the White House lawn, per The Information.

“Stargate” is commonly misunderstood as a Trump program, or something that has raised $500 billion, when what it actually is is Oracle raising debt to build data centers for OpenAI. Instead of staying in its lane as a dystopian datacenter mobster, Oracle entered into negative-to-extremely-low margin realm of GPU rentals, raising $58 billion in debt and signing $248 billion in data center leases to service a 5-year-long $300 billion contract with OpenAI that it doesn’t have the capacity for and OpenAI doesn’t have the money to pay for.

Oh, and TikTok? The billion-user social network that Oracle sort-of-just bought? There’s one little problem with it: per The Information, ByteDance investors estimate TikTok lost several billion dollars last year on revenues of roughly $20 billion, attributed to its high growth costs and, per The Information, “higher operational and labor costs in overseas markets compared to China.”

Now, I know what you’re gonna say: Ellison bought TikTok as a propaganda tool, much like Musk bought Twitter. “The plan isn’t for it to be profitable,” you say. “It’s all about control” you say, and I say, in response, that you should know exactly how fucked Oracle is.

In its last quarter, Oracle had negative $13 billion in cash flow, and between 2022 and late 2025 quintupled its PP&E (from $12.8 billion to $67.85 billion), primarily through the acquisition of GPUs for AI compute. Its remaining performance obligations are $523 billion, with $300 billion of that coming from OpenAI in a deal that starts, according to the Wall Street Journal, “in 2027,” with data centers that are so behind in construction that the best Oracle could muster is saying that 96,000 B200 GPUs had been “delivered” to the Stargate Abilene data center in December 2025 for a data center of 450,000 GPUs that has to be fully operational by the end of 2026 without fail. 

And what’re the margins on those GPUs? Negative 100%. 

Oracle, a business borne of soulless capitalist brutality, has tied itself existentially to not just the success of AI, but the specific, incredible, impossible success of OpenAI, which will have to muster up $30 billion in less than a year to start paying for it, and another $270 billion or more to pay for the rest…at a time when Oracle doesn’t have the capacity and has taken on brutal debt to build it. For Oracle to survive, OpenAI must find a way to pay it four times the annual revenue of Microsoft Azure ($75 billion), and because OpenAI burns billions of dollars, it’s going to have to raise all of that money at a time of historically low liquidity for venture capital. 

Did I mention that Oracle took on $56 billion of debt to build data centers specifically for OpenAI? Or that the banks who invested in these deals don’t seem to be able to sell off the debt?

Let me put it really simply:

• Larry Ellison’s wealth is almost entirely tied up in Oracle stock.
• Oracle’s stock is tied to the company “Oracle,” which is currently destroying its margins and annihilating its available cash to buy GPUs to serve a customer that cannot afford to pay it.
• Oracle has taken on ruinous debt that can only be paid if this customer, which cannot afford it and needs to raise money from an already-depleted venture capital pool, actually pays it.
• Oracle’s stock has already been punished for these debts, and that’s before OpenAI fails to pay for its contract.
• Oracle now owns part of one of its largest cloud customers, TikTok, which loses billions of dollars a year, and the US entity says, per Bloomberg, that it will “retrain, test and update the content recommendation algorithm on US user data,” guaranteeing that it’ll fuck up whatever makes it useful, reducing its efficacy for advertisers.
• Larry Ellison’s entire financial future is based on whether OpenAI lives or dies. If it dies, there isn’t another entity in the universe that can actually afford (or has interest in) the scale of the compute Oracle is building.

We are setting up for a very funny and chaotic situation where Oracle simply runs out of money, and in the process blows up Larry Ellison’s fortune. However much influence Ellison might have with the administration, Oracle has burdened itself with debt and $248 billion in data center lease obligations — costs that are inevitable, and are already crushing the life out of the company (and the stock). 

The only way out is if OpenAI becomes literally the most-successful cash-generating company of all time within the next two years, and that’s being generous. This is not a joke. This is not an understatement. Sam Altman holds Larry Ellison’s future in his clammy little hands, and there isn’t really anything anybody can do about it other than hope for the best, because Oracle already took on all that debt and capex.

Forget about politics, forget about the fear in your heart that the darkness always wins, and join me in The Hater’s Guide To Oracle, or My Name’s Larry Ellison, and Welcome To Jackass.