Oracle's Best Day Since 1992 Puts Ellison on Top of the World's Richest List

Oracle shares had their best day since 1992, skyrocketing 36% and adding $244 billion in market value as surging AI-driven cloud demand pushed the company toward a $1 trillion valuation. The surge boosted founder Larry Ellison's fortune by $100 billion, making him the new world's wealthiest person. CNBC reports: The company said Tuesday after the bell that it has $455 billion in remaining performance obligations, up 359% from a year earlier. "This is a very historic kind of print right here from Oracle with this backlog," Ben Reitzes, technology research head at Melius Research, told CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" on Tuesday. "The Street was looking for about $180 billion in RPO and they're talking about a number that is a multiple of that. That is astounding."

Oracle now sees $18 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2026, with the company calling for the annual sum to reach $32 billion, $73 billion, $114 billion and $144 billion over the subsequent four years. Other analysts were left "blown away" and "in shock." D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria called it "absolutely staggering on CNBC's "Fast Money." Wells Fargo analysts said it was a "momentous confirmation" of the AI trade.

Oracle's cloud revenue projections overshadowed an otherwise lackluster fiscal first-quarter report in which the company missed expectations on the top and bottom lines. The company had earnings of an adjusted $1.47 per share for the quarter, just below the $1.48 per share expected by analysts polled by LSEG. Revenue for the first quarter came in at $14.93 billion, missing the $15.04 billion expected.

Just a friendly reminder

[rsilvergun]

Oracle is built from the ground up using stolen technology paid for by taxpayer dollars in public universities.

You would be hard-pressed to find a billionaire that would still be a billionaire without government money. Your money.

But remember the real problem here is poor kids getting free school lunch.

Re:

[jfdavis668]

But it did successfully kill DB2.

Re:Just a friendly reminder

[drinkypoo]

You mean This DB2 that IBM is stills selling [ibm.com] and is an integral part of a whole family of IBM servers?

Re:

[jfdavis668]

Actually, no. The version that ran on System 360 etc.

Re:Just a friendly reminder

[drinkypoo]

Oh so you mean the Db2 that is still part of IBM i [wikipedia.org] (nee AS/400) which is still being sold as replacement for older systems as it will run their software, and still getting updates?

Re:

[_merlin]

The successor to System/360 is IBM Z [wikipedia.org]. Db2 for z/OS is still available and supported, though, so jfdavis668 is wrong anyway. AFAIK there are currently two different products called Db2 - the one for Linux, AIX and Windows (current version is called 12.1), and the one for z/OS (current version is called 13.1).

IBM i doesn't actually use Db2. There's an integrated RDBMS in the SLIC virtual machine, but it isn't treated as part of the Db2 product family.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Greetings fellow midrange enthusiast.

Re:Just a friendly reminder

[Tony Isaac]

Stolen? Really?

I'm no fan of Ellison. But by your logic, every single commercial software company ever, is built on technology pioneered by taxpayer dollars in public universities. The operating systems we use, the database technology, all of it, started out at least in part, as concepts envisioned at universities and other government-funded labs. That was the original intent of the government funding, to provide fundamental research that would result in commercial technology products.

I'm personally unhappy that Trump's DOGE has stripped public funding from research at many institutions. And I'm unhappy about this despite the fact that much of this research is done with the hope of transforming the findings into commercial products. It's part of what makes (made) America great.

By the way, poor kids do get free school lunches (and breakfasts). I know, I was one of them, back in the 1970s. They still do.

Re:

[wyHunter]

Indeed. Of course, the poster who claimed this makes Lenin look like a leftist, and Ellison is not.

Funny that 1992

[ebunga]

That's when the last AI hype cycle ended.

Amazing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does he have copies of the Epstein files?

Re:

[jfdavis668]

He did, but the hard drive was thrown away by accident.

Back catalog

[jrq]

Just wait and see when Oracle calls in the licenses for the document parsing OutsideIn (formally, Stellent), like they did for JDKs.
OutsideIn being the industry-standard for parsing and scraping all the document formats going back years.(WordPerfect archives, anyone?).
Need to feed your LLM with documents from the mid '80s on?
Get your stock now, before it really blasts off!

I wish

[registrations_suck]

I wish I had invested everything I own in Oracle last week.

Re:

[Local ID10T]

Do it this week. There is still time before the bubble pops.

When you get on the bus is not as important as jumping off before the crash.

Re:

[nanoflower]

You can see people raking in the profits already with the stock down over 6% on Thursday and likely down again today. The time to really have got into Oracle was about six months ago since the stock is up over 100% since then. I guess it was late into the AI boom that everyone else has been enjoying in the tech world.

ORACLE

[Sebby]

One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Well, it's not so bad, he's just replacing another one called Elon Musk.

Surprising Background

[Thelasko]

This CNBC article [cnbc.com] had a surprising quote:

The big hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google, he said, have instituted a strategy of “offloading their capacity to other data center providers.” That’s leading businesses to use Oracle. “These are not organic customers to Oracle,” said Luria, who recommends holding the stock. “This is Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s customers that will use Oracle capacity.”

So the Big 3 cloud providers don't own their own data centers? Is the cloud some sort of infinite regress? Is it turtles all the way down? [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[nightflameauto]

This CNBC article [cnbc.com] had a surprising quote:

The big hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google, he said, have instituted a strategy of “offloading their capacity to other data center providers.” That’s leading businesses to use Oracle. “These are not organic customers to Oracle,” said Luria, who recommends holding the stock. “This is Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s customers that will use Oracle capacity.”

So the Big 3 cloud providers don't own their own data centers? Is the cloud some sort of infinite regress? Is it turtles all the way down? [wikipedia.org]

Turns out, it's not other people's computers, it's other, other, other people's computers. Or perhaps other, other, other, other people's computers. It's amazing we've managed to perpetuate the scam economy all the way into server land. We truly are remarkably ingenious is duping ourselves.

Re:

[lazarus]

I don't know who Gil Luria is or how good he is at his job, but that statement is very misleading. All hyperscalers, including Oracle, use third party data center providers.

How it works: Companies like NVidia and OpenAI have partners. So let's say you're a medium-sized company ($500M+ market cap) and you want to deploy some machine learning capability. You go to NVidia and say "I'd like to purchase 5 of your GB300 liquid-cooled racks. NVidia says "Excellent, do you have a service provider for those?"

Prognostications

[larryjoe]

Telsa's stock is much higher than fundamentals would dictate based on a Elon's prognostications that self-driving cars are imminent. Oracle's stock shot up today based on prognostications that its data centers would grow more than 10x in the next 5 years. Neither claim is believable. Oracle is saying that an extrapolation of its recent one-quarter cloud growth projected over 20 quarters will make it competitive in size with AWS and Azure, something that Google Cloud has failed to accomplished over many years. A lot of projections and claims are huge stretches. AMD is projected to increase earnings by 3x in one year. A lot of these claims don't make sense. But many people profit of these prognostications based on confident salesmanship. People like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk.

Ellison

[cirby]

Richest man in the world, but 90%+ of the population has no freakin' idea who he is or why he's important.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

That statement is true for just about every billionaire ever.

Re:

[madbrain]

Unfortunately, not for Elon Musk.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Well, count me among the 90% who don't know why Elon Musk is important.

The earnings miss

[madbrain]

Was the real news - what actually happened. The forecast is optimistic, and rather long-term - 4 years out. I'm skeptical that it will be realized. Some investors obviously disagree and bid up the stock 40%. Time will tell if it was warranted.

Oracle should use AI on Oracle!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of us have heard stories of Oracle's RDBMS being an unmaintainable clusterfuck of biblical proportions. To address this problem I have a pro tip for uncle Larry guaranteed to make him even richer.

Replace all of your devs with a legion of vibe coders running LLMs in a loop (e.g. agents) to automate the development and commit changes to the Oracle codebase. You'll not only save billions in overhead productivity will go way way way up.

How is Oracle possible still?

[kwanbis]

I mean, I don't think there are many companies as hated by the IT community as Oracle, Broadcom comes to mind, so who is buying so much from Oracle? Honest question here.

Re:

[atrimtab]

Oracle sells forever revenue harvesting licenses to executives who do not understand (or care) about permanent lock-in of their technology stacks.

Is this is a parasitic or symbiotic relationship? Opinions differ.

If an executive does not understand tech, Oracle is a safe bet to their Board and customers.

WTF is "RPO" ?

[Tetch]

Does anyone here have the remotest idea what "remaining performance obligations" might be ? ... TFS says it's an extraordinary increase in whatever that is which had made the Oracle share price rise and thus made Ellison richer.

Re:

[timeOday]

It's money Oracle has signed contracts to get, but which hasn't been billed yet.

For example if they signed a 5-year $10M contract with a customer for cloud services, they probably aren't getting the whole $10M upfront. In year 1 they might get $2M as revenue, and the remaining $8M would be on the books as RPO.

Having people under contract to pay you for years into the future isn't quite money in the bank, but it bodes well.

What Bryan Cantrill has to say about Oracle.

[Misagon]

Cantrill was at Sun when it was taken over by ORACLE, and had some things to say about ORACLE [youtu.be].

This is gold, IMHO. Bear with it. It gets better and better.

Re:

[madbrain]

Thank you for this. I spent a day day 1:1 with Bryan related to dtrace while working at Sun 2 decades ago. I was not aware of his sense of humor.

Well, AI sure is in a bubble now...

[ndykman]

I mean, it's a good use of a cash from your hostage, err, loyal customer base when there isn't anything else around to suck the living life out of, err, bring new levers of enterprise stability to.

But you have to have somewhere to go when things deflate. In this case, you just have an amazing amount of hardware assets you can't repurpose to do anything outside of supercomputing and (knock on wood), they still have their own clusters.

It will deflate. The wow factor has worn off and the claims are getting more insistent with less and less actual data. Bigger models aren't leading to bigger gains, the slop is already poisoning the well. There are no noticeable real productivity gains, more and more actual revenue is just middlemen trying to get brought up while the money is still sloshing around.

When the biggest player in the space is part of a backroom deal to mandate usage of their product in a federal government agency, things have already gone off the rails. It just takes time for the whole thing to crash and to see what is left in the wreckage.

Oracle killed dyndns.org

[mcarp]

I had a lifetime subscription to dyndns.org starting from the days of it needing funding. Oracle bought dyndns and KILLED IT. so FUCK you Oracle.