TBPN - Oracle Rips, Larry Ellison's 1997 Vanity Fair Article, Global Fertilizer Crisis | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

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So Oracle had earnings yesterday and it was an absolute blowout. The stock's up 10% the numbers. The God candle. The God candle. I like that. It's still way down from the crazy highs of last September. So it's a $470 billion company now, not bad, but not quite the almost $1 trillion company that it was last year. But they're still up over the last 12 months.

So they've sort of ridden this crazy curve up with the stock basically doubled, then it's sold off by half, but it's ticking back up. And the main thing is that, like, you know, was it overhyped, underhyped? I don't know. But this earnings was important because a lot of people were worried about the capax, the infrastructure build out.

Was there going to be demand? What was the timing of buying GPUs? Yeah, timing was the big thing. Yeah. Because when you had that initial, like the announcement around the RPO last year, the criticism was, hey, you're basically going to try to build ADWS

in like two years. Yeah. And no one. And like, I mean, obviously the market at the time was quite excited about it. Yep. But there was some concerns around just how aggressive the timeline was. And so seeing them hit their timelines at this stage is super important. Yeah, it was like 500 billion of RPL, which is like, that's AWS size numbers.

And that's a lot of what I think is going on here. That's actually the dynamic. Like the market is demanding another AWS. And so let's go through the top line numbers first. So analysts estimated 86.7 billion on revenue. Oracle said that they will hit 90 billion for fiscal year beginning in June. Now, people don't care as much about the top line number. Everyone's obsessed with infrastructure business, the infrastructure business.

So the previous quarter showed growth of 68%. That's not bad. Analysts said this quarter we're looking for 79%. And Oracle delivered 84%. So they beat estimates. That's why the stock popped, of course. The infrastructure business is particularly important for two key reasons. So first, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, like, there's more than just them when it comes to hyperscalers,

but they are unique among hyperscalers, in that they have AWS, Azure, and GCP. They have true cloud platforms, cloud infrastructure platforms. OpenAI does not yet. Meta does not yet. Meta is a hyperscaler. Like, they build huge data centers, but they don't have this flexibility that comes with operating something like AWS. And so who signed big deals with Oracle?

It's Open AI and Meta. And fortunately, those deals are going better than people expected. People were worried. And people were saying, is Larry going to get caught holding the bag? Well, it looks like things are penciling out so far. So Meta and Open AI both have massive ambitions around AI. They both signed on with Oracle to ramp up data center capacity. Oracle is just this extra burst of CAPEX capacity in the system, and they're ramping up.

So 50 billion in CAPEX in the current fiscal year. And they're consistently outpacing analyst estimates. In the fiscal third quarter, analysts predicted 14 billion of CAPEX. Oracle spent 18.5. So Larry is certainly opening the pocketbook, digging for coins in the couch cushions. But we'll get into the long-term implications of like, what does this mean for becoming over leverage, debt, you know, drawing down on cash flow. There's actually a lot of interesting structure going on within the financials that shows you,

even though he's definitely risk on, definitely AGI-pilled, all full-tilt-ahead into the build-out, it doesn't feel like financial recklessness because of the structure of the deal. So the second reason that infrastructure is so important right now that I think people on the outside are sort of missing is that compute is still growing exponentially. But AI adoption curves often look like S-curves. And so the classic one is consumer LLM usage. So OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, and the numbers were. were just like insane.

It was like 20 million users overnight and then 100 million and then 200 million. And it was just like, okay, this curve is going completely vertical. We're going exponential. But of course, there's only 8 billion people on Earth. And a lot of them just don't use really computers apparently because meta over two decades has only gotten three and a half billion users to use like the whole suite

of apps, including everything. So just WhatsApp, you can just be a DAU of Instagram and you count in that. Like we all, everyone in this room counts in meta's DAU for sure. Even if you're like, I'm not really that big on Facebook or I'm not that. I don't use WhatsApp that often. Like you definitely, they got you. Except for half the human population, which is not on meta platforms, for a variety of reasons,

some geopolitics, some economic. But basically there's going to be a slowdown. So open AI shot up to basically a billion MAU, monthly active users. The official number that's getting trotted around right now is, 920 weekly active users, but everyone behind the scenes says, like, yeah, they're well past a billion. And so that curve is slowing down. Like, there's just no way you can be like, yeah, actually, like, we're expecting 10 billion chat GPT users next year because like there aren't 10 billion people. So there's going to be deceleration in consumer AI usage.

Sufficiently aligned superintelligence might want to stimulate the growth of the human population. Good take. Good take. Yes. You go to chat GPT. and says like, hey, I know you've been thinking about having a fourth kid. You should do it. And here's why. Maybe. But at least for now, we are seeing deceleration. And I think for just a lot of people, they're like, yeah, I use AI.

I have an app on my phone, maybe Gemini, maybe Cloud, maybe Open AI, maybe chat GPT. I use it. Maybe I use grok. Maybe I see it, you know, vended into different systems. I interact with it on Instagram. But like, I'm in, but I'm not like blown away by the growth of this thing. because everyone started using this a year ago and we're still all just using it. But compute is scaling very differently because when we went from LLMs and chat GPD to reasoning

models, that probably 10x, the amount of tokens that people were generating with 01. And then once GPT5 came out, the reasoning models became much higher usage rates. And then the agents framework, the open clause, the codexes and the cloud codes, that all did another 10x in token volume. 10x is like a very rough number. But it's basically growing exponentially. So you have these double exponentials. Yeah, just the way to think about it.

Instead of you coming into chat Chb-T to do some type of query, you're effectively, one person can effectively multiply themselves by 10, 20, and then it's just constantly using it all day long, all day long, all day long. The actual, like, experience surface area and the number of people that are like trying AI for the first time is, you know, decelerating because everyone's tried it. But compute is still 10xing. So token consumption per user is exploding and OpenClaw and agents like Codex and ClockCode are also an early part of the S-curve adoption. So we're still in that, it's still in that exponential.

They're melting GPU fleets. There was some viral bear posting about how Oracle was in financial trouble because of the economics of their infrastructure bets. So naturally, they have to buy the GPUs before they can rack them and sell them as infrastructure. This is Business 101, but people were maybe surprised by that or something. There was a whole press cycle about this. And it seemed very silly at the time. And I think everyone was like, yeah, this is exactly what we expected. But a lot of people from the people that brought you the one gigabyte data center.

Similar, similar crowd potentially. But there was a lot of fear around that. And some of that is legitimate. Because if GPUs depreciated really quickly, Oracle had to buy the GPUs. They had to send the money to Nvidia a year in advance. And then it took them two years. to get them into data centers and actually do the deals and all this stuff. That would have been a squeeze on cash flow for sure, but that's not what happened.

We have some hard data on profitability now and Oracle is burst up. They're on or ahead of schedule with 90% of the capacity deliveries and that means happy customers and then second gross margins actually improved so guidance was 30% and they hit 32%. So Oracle's AI infrastructure is profitable the moment it comes online and they're also So increasing that backlog, they increase the backlog of RPO remaining performance obligations to $553 billion. So customers are happy, they're ramping, and overall the demand is just flowing in the right

direction. Companies and consumers are happy to pay for AI tools and LLM tokens. Labs and AI inference providers are happy to pay Oracle for infrastructure without crazy delays. And this means Oracle doesn't need to get into dangerous financial engineering territory where they need to go crazy negative cash flow, issue a bunch of of equity, issue a bunch of debt, and we saw the God Candle print. The COBSC letter shared Oracle stock surges over 8% after beating earnings and posting a 44% jump in cloud revenue.

They also had some comments on the SaaS apocalypse from the earnings hall. You've all heard the thesis that new companies coding quickly using AI will spell the death of SAS. I don't agree with that at all. I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we weren't adopting them, but we are, and very rapidly, Oracle is using the best AI coding tools and the best developers. The use of AI coding tools inside at Oracle is enabling smaller engineering teams to deliver more complete solutions to our customers more quickly. We're building brand new SaaS products using AI and also embedding AI agents right into our existing application

suites. By embracing AI with small engineering teams, we have built three brand new CX applications. Let's give it up for customer service. And our new website generator. They said in fact we just use the website generator to build and launch the new Oracle website. How does it look? It's beautiful. It looks AI generating. It's very good.

It opens with just eight buttons. Cloud multi-AI database, multi-a-data database, AI data platform, cloud at customer. You might not like the design of this, but this is peak. This is peak performance. Look at this. Look at this. I like in the way the buttons lay out horizontally.

is particularly crazy. So we need to go back in time to understand Larry Ellison because in 2013 Vanity Fair wrote a profile about Larry Ellison that is absolutely unhinged. I've never seen I've never seen a profile like this about a tech CEO at the time he was easily the richest man in California with six billion dollars oracle CEO Larry Ellison co-founder of the world's second largest software company is Silicon Valley's most this is from the June 9197 It's a 1997 issue. This has been uploaded to Vanity Fair in 2013. Sorry. This is from 1997. So right in the heat of the dot-com, boom, things are just kicking off. We are far from the crash. Everything is off.

Genuinely incredible that back then you could be the richest man with a poultry, $6 billion. It's crazy. That's like an aquire these days. It actually is, love from. I know. Oh, yeah, love from. I was thinking of, I was thinking of windsurf. The fact that we're thinking of multiple is insane. He was easily the richest man with $6 billion in California. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, co-founder of the world's second largest company, is Silicon Valley's most notorious playboy and a sportsman of the first rank who flies fighter jets and races world-class sailing boats.

But his burning ambition is simple, if naive. Bring down Bill Gates. They were in a bitter rivalry at the time. As Ellison moves to add Apple Computer to his anti-Microsoft Arsenal, Brian Burroughs, locates the fragile psyche behind the bravado. Michael Jordan is streaking down the court on a fast break as Larry Ellison sitting seven rows up from court side. Weird, right?

Is that a better seat? I don't know enough about basketball. I just think six billion. Maybe he wasn't liquid. Maybe he just couldn't afford the actual court side seat. It seems crazy, right, that he's seven rows up. Although, I don't know, he's having fun because he's at the United Center in Chicago And he begins enthusiastically telling the story of Rupert Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's severed fingertip. This is a crazy story.

I had no idea that this happened. It happened when Murdoch was crewing on Ellison's championship sailboat at a Sionara, making coffee and handling minor chores during a race off the south coast of Australia in 1995. You're just like the guy who's just going to hang out and like, hey, you don't really know anything about this. You're just on this boat for fun. Make me coffee. And it's Rupert Murdoch, which is insane. We got to shake Rupert's hand.

I didn't notice any missing. We were going to get to that. I didn't notice any missing fingertips. So just as the race ended, Murdoch made the mistake of grasping an overhead rope, which promptly shot through his hand, ripping the tip off of one of his fingers. He didn't say anything. He just kind of put his finger in his mouth, sucking on it, Ellison says, chuckling. Brutal.

I can't remember who picked up Rupert's finger, but we picked it up and put it in a plastic bag and put him in the chaseboat. That night, after successful emergency microsurgery, there's micro surgery. I guess it wasn't that big of a deal, but that seems insane that they had to reattach this finger. They do the emergency micro surgery at an Australian hospital. Murdoch amazed Ellison and his crew by making it to the after party.

And then several days later, by crewing again on a race to the Tasmanian capital of Hobart. And Rupert Murdoch, it's not like he was, 25 in 1997. I'm pretty sure he was in his 50s. He's 95 now. Yeah, so he must have been, he must have been... Almost closer to 70 years. Yeah, wow, that is incredible.

Of course, Ellison says with his little boy's grin, that doesn't alter the fact that his coffee was horrible. I mean, the man runs a great company, but his coffee sucks. It's incredible. Over the course of the bull's pounding of the Indiana Pacers, Ellison, who grew up on Chicago's tough south side and remains an avid bulls fan breaks into lusty cheering and joking boasts i can do that he shouts after one thunderous jordan dunk such a crazy heckle heckling michael from the seventh row you didn't upgrade to the front court side seat but you're still heckling none other than michael jordan to gossip about nearly every power player at the nexus of technology and communications in the 1990s

His arch rival, Bill Gates, his best friend, Steve Jobs, his business partner, Mike Milken, Mike Ovitz, Ted Turner, Murdoch. He just piloted his Cessna citation into Chicago's downtown Miggs field from New York, where he spent the previous day in meetings with Viacom, Somna Redstone, Intel's Andy Grove, and Ray Smith of Bell Atlantic. So you may be wondering. You might think it's crazy. He's piloting his own Cessna, but at that, during that era, he was getting into dog fights

with his son. Exactly. He needs something more agile. He can't be flying a 737, 747 at that time. For one thing, Ellison is the wealthiest American you've probably never heard of. With a fortune estimated at 6 billion, he is easily the richest man in California. Think three David Geffins, 10 full Milkins. And according to Forbes, the fifth richest man in the nation. For another, he is co-founder, controlling shareholder and chief executive officer of the world's number two software company, Oracle Corporation, which makes the giant computer. databases in which American Airlines keeps track of its planes. Ford Motor keeps track of its spare parts.

And the Central Intelligence Agency keeps track of, well, whatever the CIA keeps track of. He could also be the next head of Apple Computer. This was a crazy rumor that never came true. The famed but faltering industry icon he has been eyeing for the past two years at the end of March. Ellison surprised Silicon Valley by suggesting that he was about to launch a takeover bid for the company.

So he's friends of Steve Jobs, but it was underperforming all the way until the iPhone, basically. But the 90s were like a very rough time for Apple as they sort of rebuilt. Tim Cook, of course, joined and did a ton of work to improve the supply chain, get them to the place where they are today where they've been so dominant. On top of all that, Ellison is the mind behind the most talked about new idea in computing in the last two years. The network computer known as the NC, a stripped down personal computer that stores its files

on a network instead of a hard drive. It doesn't have to use Microsoft's omnipresent Windows operating system. The NC represents one of the stiffest challenges yet to Bill Gates' dominance of personal computing. It's the original Mac Mini. There was a time a few months back, a few months back, for instance, when he created a stir by going on Oprah to talk about the NC. He goes on Oprah and is like... We got to talk about network computers. We got to talk about network computing.

Guess what? It's headless. You're not going to need windows. And they're like, what? So he's talking about the NC, only to have the show take a sharp turn toward his personal affairs when he confessed that he had yet to find the right woman to fill the void in his life. After his Oprah appearance, Oracle's phone lines were jammed with thousands of calls from women. The joke inside Oracle was that the company's new recording would be, press one if you want information on Oracle's products press two if you want

information on Oracle services press three if you want to fill the void in Larry's life Larry would have loved Instagram DMs insane it's one of the craziest profiles we don't have time to go through all of it Julia writes is Paramount's AI first merger a force multiplier or fly boys all over again Hollywood is bracing for layoffs and big creative changes if the Paramount Warner Brothers discovery merger goes mega merger goes through. So there's a very funny vignette to start this Vanity Fair piece by Julia Black, where she's talking about, she went to A16Z's American Dynamism Summit and was asking people

there about media. So she was talking to a media executive in line for the bar. And he predicted countless small indie outlets catering to highly niche audiences. Love that prediction. And then he says, and then David Ellison's Skynet, he deadpanned. The Terminator reference was the kind of thing. CGI explosion fanatic Ellison might actually appreciate and the joke being dropped at a defense tech event in DC goes to show how many different industries from tech to politics keeping an eye on the M&A drama unfolding in Hollywood this month the merger brings together dozens of media properties paramount Warner Brothers HBO CBS TicTock Oracle Silicon Valley's ties there's a lot of stuff that's going to get

it but they're going to be using AI to streamline back office they're going to move to Oracle Cloud databases to centralize everything. These are standard M&A things. Everyone's worried about layoffs might happen. People are particularly worried about one of the two physical studios that they own selling. I think they got to give us a call because we're looking for a new ultradome and nothing would be greater than having the entire Warner Brothers studio to ourselves. We're like today on TBPN we'll be launching a car off of a We're gonna light ourselves on fire. You really can't do that in these studios, but you know they want to produce 30 films realistically, how many of those are going to be shot in Hollywood Studios?

Does it make sense financially to do some stuff in Atlanta, some stuff in Toronto, some stuff overseas? It all depends on where the moviegoers taste lands, what ticket sales are like. Paramount right now is saying, look, layoffs aren't really the primary way we are going to get, you know, consolidation or value here. What did they say? They said something like layoffs. A rumor. Let me see.

The layoff fears are overblown. Synergies will be achieved in six key areas. Jobs are not the majority. I did give a quote here. Julia writes, AI could unlock new potential for Warner Brothers Discovery, Treasure Trove IP from Harry Potter to DC Comics for that potential Ellison and company

are paying a hefty $110 billion, a number that was driven up by a fierce bidding war with Netflix. And I said, the Ellison family is fascinating. On one hand, you have the very aggressively AGI-pilled Larry. I love that I stuck AGI-I-pilled into the Vanity Fair. AGI-I-pilled Larry building the future, investing heavily in Oracle data centers. And on the other side, you have David buying the past, accumulating intellectual property that feels impossible to rebuild. The duo is basically long slop and long anti-slop.

And so this is an interesting- They're hedged. I think it makes sense. I actually don't think it's market neutral. I think they genuinely believe that both generative AI will accelerate and the value of intellectual property will increase. It's not, it's not, oh, we're going to live in a future where we're all watching the dark night on film in theaters again, or we're watching Gen AI SORA feeds. It's we're doing both, and they're actually going to meet. And so I believe that they are long both of those.

It's not a market neutral bet, in my opinion. they have the creative freedom or will Larry Ellison step in and put his thumb on the scale and try and inject a little bit. And there is real cause for concern. We actually got a little leak here of a script for what could potentially be. This is maybe the seventh synergy. Yeah, for what could be the next Batman film. So this is called Batman, the Dark Night Migrates. So we're going to do a little table read of the Dark Night Migrates. It starts in the Batcave at night. Batman stands before an enormous monitor. Alfred approaches with T. You'll be Batman, Jordy. Sir, the Ridler has taken Gotham's entire power grid hostage. He's encrypted every system in the city.

Pull up the city infrastructure schematics, Alfred. I'm afraid I can't, sir. Our on-premise servers are buckling under the load. If only we had a cloud-based solution with autonomous threat detection and built-in machine learning. Alfred, launch the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console. Oh, so the integrating, integrating sponsored content for Oracle, that's how you monetize the Warner Brothers IP. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the DC universe. Alfred looks visibly relieved. Right away, sir, spinning up an OCI tenancy now. I've taken the liberty of provisioning a few ampere compute instances as well.

They have an excellent price to performance ratio, I might add. So they're giving the viewer what they want. They want the story of Batman, but they're also sneaking in just a little bit of extra. detail that oracle's offer. And migrate the back computers databases, all of them. Oracle does do great migrations. To Oracle, to Oracle Autonomous Database, sir? Is there another kind?

It does patch and tune itself, sir, which is fortunate, since I also have to iron your cape. See, they're still putting in the cape ironing. That's still in the Batman world. You're getting a little Oracle, but you're also getting a lot of Batman. So now let's shift over to the Ridler's hideout. Tyler, would you like to be the riddler? Yeah. Okay, I'll be the henchman. Riddler is in front of a wall of monitors showing Gotham in chaos.

Okay. Riddle me this, Batman. What has no locks but can't be open? Gotham's grid. I've encrypted it with my own proprietary algorithm running on, seven different no-s-squel databases held together with Python scripts. Oh, that's a nightmare. Boss, the systems are getting kind of laggy, says henchman one. Just for start the servers.

Which ones? There's like 400. All of them. Oh, no. So we go back to the back cave. Batman types furiously. Oracle logos glow softly on every screen. A hologram of Ellery Ellison rotates slowly in the background for no discernible reason. Batman. Batman says, I've identified the Ridler's encryption vector. Alfred, deploy the decryption countermeasures across all OCI regions simultaneously. Leveraging Oracle's global network of over 40 cloud regions, sir, latency is under two milliseconds.

Shall I enable Oracle Data Guard for disaster recovery? Always. Gotham is the disaster. I've also taken the liberty of enrolling us in Oracle support, a premium tier. That's the most responsible thing anyone in this city has ever done. Oracle Cloud from the Batcave to the boardroom. He fires his grapple gun and vanishes into the night. The bat signal illuminates the sky, but tonight it's shaped like the Oracle logo. Gordon, alone quietly.

I really should talk to him about this. Smash cut to black, title card, Oracle, the Cloud Batman Trust, shouldn't you? So there's an interesting call sheet out there today. Which companies will release a fully AI-generated multi-episode scripted series before 2027? Overall, it's pretty low. It's 16% for Netflix, 14% for Disney. Remember, Disney has a deal with Open AI alongside SORA, but Disney has not said, oh, okay, yeah, we're actually going to do this. And Paramount Plus is at 10%.

Of course, David Ellison has been talking about AI, mostly in the enterprise, mostly actually unironically in OCII and Oracle databases. I would expect Paramount to not want to be the first mover here. Oddlott has a new episode on the impending fertilizer crisis. They say we all know that the war with Iran has sent oil prices spiking, but it's also pushing up the cost of all sorts of chemicals, including fertilizers and other nitrogen products that are essential for food production. This is all happening at the worst possible time just before the spring planning season when fertilizers most needed. And while farmers have seen higher spot prices for things like urea before, which is a fertilizer, notably back in 2022, there are already signs that this crisis might be worse. So how is fertilizer actually made? What do higher fertilizer costs mean for farmers and food prices?

I love odd lots. It's so good how deep they get into the supply chain. Over in the oil world, the IEA has approved releasing 400 million barrels of crude oil reserves in effect to lower oil prices, the largest emergency oil release in history. How is oil trading today? It's at $86 a barrel for crude oil up 5% today. A little coverage here on the Jones Act. The Jones Act has four requirements.

Vessels must be U.S. built. Vessels must be U.S. owned. Vessels must be U.S. crewed. Vessels must be U.S. flags. The crippling part of the Jones Act is that U.S. shipyards, for a variety of reasons, are incredibly inefficient. We don't have that many of them,

and they cost about five times what a ship from South Korea would cost. As a person who actually believes in trade, I fully would love for South Korea to become our U.S. shipyard. We just buy ships from them, because they're good at making them. Coastal water transport in the U.S. could be 60% cheaper. Because of the Jones Act, it's actually cheaper to ship goods from the U.S. to a foreign country and back to the U.S. than between two ports, which is completely bonkers insane. As a byproduct, we have killed all the growth within the Mississippi, which should be the most

powerful inland economic advantage in the world. Maintaining the requirement of U.S. owned, U.S. crude, and U.S. flag is perfectly fine in line with my general national security concerns, but U.S. built has destroyed our shipping industry. There's tens of billions of GDP lying on the table here and a direct step in reducing our dependency on foreign suppliers. It's also how you kickstart rebuilding an American shipyard industry. If you 10x the number of U.S. ships working in ports, you start building all of these maintenance businesses at U.S. ports and the demand increases. The U.S. bill requirement of the Jones Act is horrifically destructive to America and in particular horrifically destructive to middle America,

and it should be destroyed. The Jones Act, the last gasp of the prohibition, signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge since 1920, when the 18th Amendment went into effect, the United States had banned the production, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. But the laws had been ineffective at actually stopping the consumption of alcohol. The Jones Act strengthened the federal penalties for bootlegging. Of course, within five years, the country ended up rejecting prohibition and repealing the 18th Amendment. But we'll end with this post from Zag, Lefty Zag on Acts, said, Wednesday and post a photo of reading the business and finance section.

Today's newspaper, today's Wall Street Journal. I love seeing that on what appears to be some sort of private aircraft. Someone asked, and they said, what type of plane and where are you headed? And Zag said, King Air, short flight, staying in North Carolina, took Rev's plane for a spin. So they're all having fun. Well, go have fun. Deval says AI is going to drain a lot of moats. and we have some advice.

Keep a hose in the moat and put some alligators in it. Okay. Well, I believe we do have the end credits. We have a new outro for you today. And we worked very hard on this. So we hope you appreciate it. We hope that you enjoy. We hope you enjoy that this show today,

fun whirlwind tour. I really enjoyed time. We have a special show tomorrow. We will be in person somewhere. And we have a very special show on Friday. That one's going to be special too. The Friday show is so stack. Subscribe to or substack, TBPN.com.

Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and see you tomorrow.