Better Offline - Monologue: OpenAI Could Kill SoftBank and Oracle

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron runs you through how OpenAI’s collapse could mortally wound SoftBank, throw the Paramount/Warner Brothers deal into chaos, kill Oracle, and destroy Larry Ellison’s empire.To celebrate the one year anniversary of the premium newsletter, I’m offering a sale on one-year subscriptions. Between now and midnight July 22, you can get a permanent annual rate of just $60— a $10 discount on the usual price of $70 - for life - https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/N9bqSLKBoS?ref=wheresyoured.at YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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What's up? It's Better Offline and I'm your host, Ed Zittron. It's your Better Offline monologue for the week. Folks, it's been a long few months and I've taken the vast majority of this week off to recoverer after writing about 100,000, 200,000 words in the last few months, not even including my upcoming book, The Haters Guide to Silicon Valley coming out in 2027. If you want to support my work, I'm currently doing a week-long sale for the premium newsletter, $10 off the annual rate for life.

They'll be in the notes. Please do, if you feel like supporting me, do that. Newslet on the podcast are now my principal source of income. It's happened. The era of smiles has begun. Join me and receive the bounties of words every week, except this one as I'm taking the week off. So let's begin, and I wanted to start by saying how you, the listener, might help me. First of all, my signal is EZetron.76.

The things I'm looking for right now that would help me are Anthropics S1 or any and all documentation of its cloud spend and financial condition, especially if you can get me something from Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud that shows me how much this company is spending. That'd be very, very helpful to me. As would any and all information about the AI revenues of any major tech company that aren't public knowledge and any and all information about the cloud spend of open AI anthropic perplexity or any other major AI startup and of course any of the financials of any AI startup you can get me. The same goes for token spend at any corporation. Please use signal. Please take

photos of any documents. Do not send me PDFs. Do not send me documents for your safety and for mine. And please, please, please, do not send me stuff that's already public. This isn't because I'm shiting you. I'm just saying people get excited and they want to help and they send me stuff that's already out there. I've probably already seen it. I'm a freak. I'm looking at this stuff all day. All right, folks, let's roll to the actual monologue. So earlier in the week, I put out a 15,000 word piece called the Open AI bubble, a massive guide to how Open AI is the cause, enabler and justification for the entire AI bubble writ large, and how everything kind of collapses when it dies. I wrote it because I've heard a lot of people say it's an Open AI bubble, not an AI bubble over the last

year as a way of waving off potential detractors, suggesting that open AI could collapse and everything else would be left behind and fine. You're living at a bubble yourself, if you think this way. That's a crazy way to live one's life. And please, please, please stop emailing me about the bailout. I've gone over the summit as it's. Anyway, in truth, open AI is the largest consumer of AI compute, accounts for over $800 billion of remaining performance obligations across hypers and neoclars, the people that rent our AI GPUs and basically just exist to funnel NVIDIA money. over $100 billion of the future revenues of Broadcom and Nvidia themselves. I go into detail about it in the piece, but I kind of wanted to go over it a little today in today's monologue too.

Open AI is also a material risk to both SoftBank and Oracle. If Open AI can't go public, soft bank is going to face a massive liquidity crisis. It has $45.9 billion in debt that matures within the next 12 months, and they'll either have to refinance it or pay it. Except that's going to be much more difficult because they've jettisoned most of its valuable stocks in T-Mobile and Nvidia, all while pushing up against the limits of what it can borrow against its holdings in the chipmaker arm, which it bought, I think, 2023 for $32 billion. It went public at $50 billion, but the holdings are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Except that's kind of a problem, which I'll get to in a minute. But SoftBank will never truly go bankrupt. That doesn't mean it's

not a problem if Open AI fails, because it would be put in a history. historic crisis, one worse than the dot-com bubble, where Masayoshi's done a bit everything in like GeoCities, and even the horrors of 2022 and 2023 when the Vision funds had losses of, what, $32 billion? Back then, SoftBank had plenty of other valuable stock and ways to raise debt. They had the Alibaba stock, they had their holdings in Betfair and other things like that, except most of that is gone now. And now S&P Global has downgraded its outlook to negative, which means they think they might actually downgrade its credit in the future. And just to be clear, they specified that the reason that S&P did that was Open AI. They said the words. They literally said it was the case.

Except now, what the hell is SoftBank meant to do? It doesn't have anything else to flog, really, other than its arm stock. And the problem there is that SoftBank is the largest holder of arm stock in the world, which makes it difficult for it to liquidate too much without spooking the market. Think of it like this. If the largest holder of a stock says, I'm just going to start selling it off for liquidity. It officially stops being about the stock in question, but the company's selling it. The value of arm will turn into a bet on whether SoftBank can afford to pay its own bills. It's already taken out a bunch of margin loans on the stock, and further loans will be difficult to raise for the very same reason. While it would be likely rescued by the Bank of

Japan and other local financial institutions, there has never been a more dangerous time for Masayoshi's son. Check out my haters' guide to SoftBank. I know it's a premium thing, but there's a deal going on, it's a beautiful deal. I stopped in the Trump impression now. And get onto one of his friends, Oracle. Now, in Oracle's case, its entire future rides an Open AI's ability to pay it about $70 billion a year in annual revenue, and that rides on Oracle's ability to build about 7.1 gigawatts or so of data center capacity in the next two or three years. I'm not kidding. It's genuinely, that's what they need to do. Oracle and Open AI have a $300 billion contract that's meant to have started on June 1st, 2026. With said revenue coming from the Stargate data centers,

the Oracle is building for Clammy Sammy, that's right, Mr. Altman, Clamuel, we don't like him. The problem, of course, is that 7.1 gigawatts of capacity needs to be built, and barely 400 megawatts of it actually exist. And that's in Stargate Abilene, a project that broke ground in the middle of 2024 and was meant to be done either the end of last year or a couple of weeks ago. and everything I hear from the people inside Oracle is that they keep firing all the people who know the fucking business works. It's a terrible thing for them.

Oh, and another thing is that Oracle literally warned in its annual report that it may or may not get paid by OpenAI and that said non-payment would potentially also mean that it couldn't lease the GPU capacity to anyone else. As in, no one else really exists that could buy it, and if they did manage to sell it to them, it would be at a massive loss. is that good?

Also, tell me, is it good that S&P Global also downgraded Oracle? Just one step above junk grade, they're barely investment grade, credit-wise for now. Fallen Angel status on incoming, maybe. I'll explain what that means. Another monologue, you don't really

care. Let's get to the funny stuff, though. Larry Ellison, CEO, is currently two different Mr. Bean type characters. He's also used 346 million of his 1.16 billion Oracle shares for an estimated $21 billion of margin loans, personal ones, just to be clear. Otherwise, he has about $10 billion in cash and $15 billion in Tesla shares. Why'd you care about that? Well, this is material, because he also has to conjure up about $20 billion in cash,

actual cash, to push through the Paramount Warner Brothers deal by September 30th, otherwise he gets fined about $500, $600 million a quarter. And to do so, regardless of whether it happens, whether it's stopped by then or whether it's meant to go through, he's likely going to have to take out further margin loans on his Oracle stock, and depending on how said stock is doing, getting that loan might be quite problematic. I think I just said problematic, but I'm just going to keep on going. Eating well shouldn't be complicated,

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It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I-Hart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating?

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Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. So to explain, a margin loan works by offering up a certain amount of shares as collateral, a little like a mortgage. So if you are taken out a 25% loan-to-value loan for $1 billion, you'd offer up about $250 million

dollars in stock, maybe a little more, depending on how volatile it is. When the value of said stock drops below a certain amount, you get forced to do something called a margin call. Well, a margin call happens to what I mean? Where you're forced to either proffer up more cash to cover the shortfall or far more likely in Ellison's case, give up more Oracle's stock. The problem that Ellison faces is the very same one that SoftBank has with Arm. He owns 40% of Oracle's shares, which means that liquidating them would be very difficult. If he started selling them off, the market would say, oh Christ, is he going to sell his 40% holdings in Oracle? Sell, sell it all. The piss index is crashing.

And to make that as worse, he's collateralised over $50 billion worth of Oracle shares, the ones I mentioned earlier, which means that if Oracle's stock drops below, say, I don't know, $60 a share, he'll be put in a vicious cycle where he'll either have to hand over more and more shares to cover the shortfall, or worse still, have to sell them to keep up. Hey, hey, stop laughing. Stop it. Stop laughing. Mr. Ellison is in real trouble. Larry Ellison could be in a real pickle. Stop it. I just kidding. Fuck Larry Ellison. Anyway, the worst part is the OpenAI doesn't even have to collapse for this to happen. The AI bubble isn't based on anyone's actual revenues, productivity or ROI. No hyperscaler actually reports their AI revenues. Oracle kind of bundles them within OCI, their infrastructure, bucket. And outside of Open AI, and anthropic, the industry is actually incredibly small, revenue-wise. Very loud and annoying, though. The markets have conflated a capex bubble, as in buying GPUs and the surrounding

gear for data centers, with a thriving AI industry, which is a nice way of saying that the current slate of prices for Microsoft, Google, Amazon Meta and Oracle, their current AI-focused bumps, are based on vibes and mania. Vibes can break. Mania subsides. All it takes for things to go pair-shaped is for the market to believe, to become convinced that Oracle won't get paid by Open AI for them to start dumping the stock. All they have to believe is that all of that CAPEX, all of that negative cash flow is just for nothing, is for a company that either won't exist or won't be able to actually afford all of that data center capacity. Every time I say this out loud, I feel crazy. The biggest myth, though, about Oracle is that it's this healthy, profitable

business and that this AI thing is just yet more good stuff that they've added on top, when in fact every other business segment other than renting out AI GPUs is either plateaued or in active decline, meaning that Oracle's entire future rides and whether it can monetize its Fn-DOM relationship with Nvidia and Jensen Wong. And really, Oracle's story is fundamentally insane right now. It's spending $340 billion or more on AI data center capacity for one client, OpenAI, in the hopes that OpenAI can bring it $70 billion a year in revenue for a contract that began a month ago, except most of the capacity is barely under construction, and because data centers take 18 to 36 months to build,

it's unlikely that more than a single gigawatt will be ready before the beginning of 2028, if at all. Building this capacity is costly. An Oracle's cash flow has been negative $20 billion or worse for the last two quarters, with plans to spend another 90s. $90 billion in the next fiscal year, which just begun in June. The 22,000 people that it laid off in the past six months were, based on discussions with many sources, load-bearing parts of its infrastructure, throwing parts of the business into active chaos, and genuinely causing problems with renewals for its Oracle database products that are the cornerstone of how Larry Ellison's heart beats. I don't know what to say. I don't know. I am just a guy.

Why am I the one that found this? It's sitting in broad daylight. Maybe people just don't do mathematics. I don't know. But this is quite bad. And the point I'm making, though, just to simplify, is that for me to be wrong, Open AI will have to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue for themselves by 2030, which will require it to become either profitable, massively profitable too, like not just like a little bit of a bit of profitability.

I mean 20, 30, 40 billion dollars a year plus, or just continually raise money. I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And no, no government bailout will cover the shortfall. The government's talking about 5% share. That be $42 billion. That won't even cover their fucking inference costs if they lasted 2027. It's a joke. Oh, and by the way, even if Open AI does that,

Oracle will have to complete the single most ambitious construction project of all time. building enough power to power multiple cities, erecting giant data centers in multiple states, make them fully operational with far less people and a shortage of both talent and the core materials like electrical grade steel, and also do so on a timeline that doesn't put it in breach of contract with OpenAI. Would it shock you if I told you that this is considered radical thinking? Would you be surprised if I told you that many journalists simply shrug when you tell them this? And they go, they'll work it out. They'll work it out. It'll all work out. It'll work out. Don't worry about it, Ed. You're crazy, Ed. Ed, why are you outside my office? Why are you dressed as a duck? Why do you keep saying, I'm the deterioration duck? Quack, quack, quack, the market's going to hell. And the answer is, that's a bit I'm working on that I'll go to later. In any case, I am kidding. And I do need to say, the future really is one strewn with chaos and carcasses. And I'm not sure the world is actually ready for it, thanks to a captured media industry. that refuses to do the messy work of reconciling with the projections that range from unrealistic to fantastical.

When the time comes, people are going to be asking why we didn't see this coming, and as I've said before, it's because nobody wanted to fucking look. Anyway, thanks as ever for listening. Things are going to get real interesting over the next few months. I just got me a Bloomberg terminal, and it's a source of unfathomable power that I believe will take my coverage to the next level. If you're on there, shoot me a message. Shoot me a goot on ploop. That's another social network on man. And I really do genuinely, deeply and meaningfully appreciate the many wonderful messages and emails I receive every day. And I'm so grateful to have such incredible fans and followers.

You're all amazing. Like, I hear from so many of you, and you're very thoughtful and smart, and you pick this stuff up very quickly. I love you all. And I assume you're bellow. We love you, chef in response. See you next week. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.

The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrists, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.

Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? It's sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the hosts of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines, the viral moments, and the stories I

Everyone's talking about across women's sports. From game-changing performances to culture-shifting conversations, we'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few laughs along the way. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jake Brennan, and on the Disgraceland Podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history.

These are the stories you haven't heard. the kind you'll end up telling someone else. Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of where that time Blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bunny. Listen to disgrace land on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea.

Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out.

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