Even fantasy money can buy a lot of power, just ask Larry Ellison
- Reference: 1757943913
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/09/15/oracle_spending_shares_opinion/
- Source link:
It was quite a week for Big Red. After distinctly pedestrian results in terms of the usual metrics — [1]profits were flat at $2.93 billion for the first quarter of 2026 while revenue also missed analysts' expectation – Oracle's share price increased by [2]40 percent overnight . Optimism was fuelled by its predictions of what customers will spend on cloud infrastructure in the next four years, propelled by an expected surge in demand for AI.
The result was that, in theory, Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder and CTO, overtook Elon Musk to [3]become the world's richest man . On paper, at least, when shares in Oracle rose by 40 percent, valuing Ellison's fortune at $393 billion, just ahead of Musk’s $384 billion. Both sums are larger than the [4]GDP of Egypt , a country of more than 100 million people, for context.
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Of course, the money would only become real if Ellison were to sell his shares, but that's not stopped him making a power grab.
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Since Oracle has achieved nearly six times the value recorded five years ago, the octogenarian already had time to make some moves.
For example, his vast fortune helped his son, David Ellison, acquire media giant Paramount in a $8 billion deal which went through in August. Now Ellison Senior is backing another bid, this time to [8]buy Warner Bros Discovery . Ellison Junior has argued the far reaching media estate, which includes Warner Bros Motion Picture Group, HBO, DC Studios and CNN, could be modernized on a single technology stack.
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As if the realm of fiction and fantasy were not enough, Ellison also has his sights set on history. The British press fizzed at the weekend with stories claiming [10]he plans to buy up large chunks of Oxford and "transform the city into the new Silicon Valley." Based in the UK city which saw the birth of one of the world's most prestigious universities nearly a thousand years ago, the Ellison Institute of Technology promises a "transformative strategic alliance" with its academic neighbor and is apparently geared towards medical science, food security, sustainable agriculture, and AI.
But keen readers will remember The Register reporting that there is something about Oracle's fairytale story of the last week which does [11]not quite add up .
Included in expected revenue for the next four years is [12]$300 billion from OpenAI over the course of five years to fuel Sam Altman's AI ambitions by providing five gigawatts of compute capacity.
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But serious questions remain over whether OpenAI has got the money. Its revenue is reportedly just $10 billion annually while it is not expected to make a profit until at least 2029. It is likely to get around $30 billion from another VC round and SoftBank, an early backer, might cough up more cash. Still, it seem a long way from the $300 billion it needs to pay Oracle, if Big Red's forcasts are ever to become reality.
Like a slow-motion cartoon double take, the world's [14]media [15]eventually [16]cottoned on to the idea that if Oracle's projected cloud revenue seemed to good to be true, maybe there was a downside risk in the direction of less than 100 percent truthful.
[17]Monty Widenius 'heartbroken' at the extent of Oracle's MySQL job cuts
[18]Oracle boasts $455B backlog from AI boom, but not all its new friends will live to pay up
[19]Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state
[20]Larry Ellison is still not the world's richest person
A keen reader of a media site asked if it was like making the shovels for people to go for mining for gold. Well yes, that analogy could work if you didn't pay the money for the shovels up front while no one was sure where the goldmine was or if the gold would be worth anything.
But who needs reality when you've lived to become the world's richest person?
As 30 years of life dredging out the tech industry’s bottom feeders dawns on The Register , it saddens us that Oracle seems to have forgotten where it all began, with databases. Last month, [21]it sidelined and downsized the team behind the RDBMS that [22]changed the world . But the small change it would take to maintain development of MySQL – the open source database it acquired with Sun Microsystems – seems beyond reach. That might require some real money. ®
Get our [23]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/10/oracle_q1_results/
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/oracle-soars-ai-cloud-gains-ellison-closes-musk-worlds-richest-2025-09-10/
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/who-is-larry-ellison-richest-person-oracle
[4] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/egypt/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aMg4FYZQk6iRcUzdhmejZgAAABU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMg4FYZQk6iRcUzdhmejZgAAABU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aMg4FYZQk6iRcUzdhmejZgAAABU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.ft.com/content/42663492-cebb-4f62-b932-c0c21c02fae4
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aMg4FYZQk6iRcUzdhmejZgAAABU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/13/how-larry-ellison-worlds-richest-man-buying-oxford/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/10/oracle_cloud_llm_cash/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/11/openai_reportedly_on_the_hook/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aMg4FYZQk6iRcUzdhmejZgAAABU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openais-funding-challenges-loom-over-oracle-broadcom-deal-spree-be353399
[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/14/an-ai-house-of-cards-worries-of-a-bubble-grow-after-oracles-rally-on-open-ai-deal.html
[16] https://www.ft.com/content/86895a63-2c5b-4aea-b385-418130b64996
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/11/oracle_slammed_for_mysql_job/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/10/oracle_cloud_llm_cash/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/coldplay_kiss_cam_privacy/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/larry_ellison_second_richest_person/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/11/oracle_slammed_for_mysql_job/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/06/30_years_mysql/
[23] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: VC money
Rather than asking ChatGPT, it would be just as reliable to ask the Magic 8 ball "Is my husband cheating on me?" and definitely more environmentally friendly.
Interestingly Geoffrey Hinton (a renowned AI "guru/gruyere" m'lud) had his partner leave him because she asked ChatGPT whether he was a "bad partner" (no doubt having poisoned the AI well beforehand) and used its affirmative answer to run off with another bloke. I'm afraid we're all going to have get used to such asinine and self-justificatory behaviour from an awful lot of people.
My SQL
European tech, bought by US money, then destroyed. Again.
Re: My SQL
"bought by US money"
Hardly the fault of the US, is it?
If Europe wanted to have a competitive tech sector it needed to have investors willing to put capital into technology at all stages and scales of business growth from seed capital onwards, including secondary equity markets, and it needed to have a supportive business environment for tech entrepreneurs.
Mario Draghi has overseen excellent work elaborating the challenges, and some possible solutions, but what's the chances of European leaders making good decisions in fast timescales?
For stocks in a publicly traded company to rise, you don't need to show profits. You don't even need to convince investors that there will be profits at some point in the future. Nobody cares about profits, only that stock prices rise before they sell. So, all you need is to convince investors that you will be able to convince more investors that there will be profits. And you can even recurse further on that. as much as you are able to.
The core business of top traded companies isn't what's on their mission statement. That's concern number two in the very best case. Their core business is bullshitting investors, and that's true for all of them. The most successful of them have become really good at it, even to the detriment of what they're theorically supposed to be doing.
Meanwhile, if you're a smart person that could really do something useful, the very best money you can make is in... finance, by far, well above any job where you would be doing anything directly productive. Shifting around wealth created by others, for a fee, is a lot more lucrative than actually creating wealth. But what happens when everyone has figured that out?
Ultimately, I think this is going to be the downfall of capitalism, unless some serious reform is done. The entire world economy is becoming a giant pyramid scheme, with state-nations' debt at the very bottom, and the pyramid keeps getting taller and thinner at the top.
"So, all you need is to convince investors that you will be able to convince more investors"
Isn't this the definition of a ponzi-scheme?
downfall of capitalism
I can see two things going on here.
Firstly, the power of hyperwealthy individuals is distorting the way societies operate. On a small scale, Ellison's Dreaming (Silicon) Spires will be staffed with people headhunted from other places. He has the money to outcompete most University salaries, and the denuded institutions in the current climate won't have the money to replace them. So if you want your kid to have a STEM career, move to Oxford. In the wider picture, these oligarchs are coming to dictate policy with their pockets. I didn't vote for Ellison, or Musk, or Zuckerberg. But crucially, I don't get to vote against them either, and politicians in democratic countries don't seem inclined to stand up to them. So what's the point in voting at all?
Secondly, the vast movements in financial markets are reminiscent of the tea tray effect. Put six cups of tea on a tray and carry them to the bottom of the garden. No problem. Now try it after pouring the tea onto the tray. Ten steps and it's down your trousers. A stupid experiment? Yes, but the same thing is what sank a car ferry with no internal partitions, killing many people. I think money is starting to show the same behaviour. No controls or rate limiting on how it can flow from place to place, institution to institution. Combine that with the whims of the megarich tech-bros and you have to wonder whether the schema of the five year plans and the Party Vision isn't a better bet for the Joe in the street.
Sigh.
Tesla
As an example of how disjointed markets are from reality, look at the latest very public announcement that musk is buying 1B of tesla. he probably owns around 100B. It pushed up the price over 10% after the announcement. So for a 1B "investment", musk gets a 10B immediate return. And what wouldn't surprise me at all is if musk already had a plan in place (because he is an insider) to sell a big chunk of shares in the near future to recoup more than the 1B he "spent". Meanwhile, tesla sales are in the tank, and the prognosis for sales isn't good either. But why care, musk bought another B worth of stock, it must go up.
Me I'm one of those boring investors. I know everyone has to sit down when the music stops on those pie in the sky corps. I buy into companies with profits, dividends and low P/E's. Oddly I don't gamble when I'm in Vegas for a convention either. I think I see a pattern.
Doing a Musk
He is full of hyerbole shit and people still think he is a genius and buy shares in companies associated to him.
Fuck knows why when history shows Musk makes PT Barnum look honest.
Lets just hope they end up doing a Ratner sooner rather than later
VC money
"It is likely to get around $30 billion from another VC round"
I am seeing people these days using ChatGPT as online tarot to ask if their husbands are cheating on them. Asked real questions about networking , and came up wrong.
Hope those VC get their money back.