Oracle has been in a slow-motion collapse for nearly a decade, propped up by more than $85 billion in acquisitions over 23 years, chronic customer abuse, and a debt load that keeps growing. The mythology around Larry Ellison's empire, that it is profitable, growing, and unstoppable, is fiction. The reality is a revenue chart that barely moved between the 2009 Sun Microsystems acquisition for $5.7 billion and the 2021 Cerner acquisition for $28.3 billion, and a margin chart that has cratered as Oracle pours capital into AI GPUs, with over $99 billion in capital expenditures since mid-2020.
Forensic accountant Howard M. Schilit has documented Oracle's accounting practices as a textbook case of financial maneuvers masking a declining core business. The Cerner acquisition added roughly $6 billion in annual revenue but at margins of 21.7%, roughly 40 points below Oracle's other business lines, and Oracle immediately responded with office closures and mass layoffs. Every major product line outside databases is assembled from acquired companies, stitched together with what customers and analysts consistently describe as contempt for the buyer.
This piece is the second in a series. The first, the Hater's Guide To Oracle, established how Ellison built an empire on a database cash cow, aggressive Java licensing enforcement, and an ERP product that competes with SAP for most painful enterprise software experience. Part two goes further: the OpenAI infrastructure deals, the GPU margin destruction, and why the company's AI bet may be the last bad decision it gets to make. The financial charts alone are worth opening the full article.
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