Let’s start here by noting how fundamentally irritating it is that we feel a need to keep an eye on Larry Ellison’s giant dragons’ hoard of money: In a perfect world (that still somehow had billionaires in it), Ellison would simply spend his cash making the world a better place, maybe by donating it to philanthropic causes, or designing ever-more-elaborate traps with which to ensnare the hated Beagle Boys. As is, though, we’ve gotten multiple reminders from just within the very recent memory of the pop culture world as to what a deforming impact the Oracle oligarch’s gold piles can have, as he’s been bankrolling his son David’s purchases of first Paramount, and now Warner. Bros., over the course of basically a single year. Sure, the family had to take on dozens of billions of dollars in debt to do it, but Oracle money is still a core component of what’s allowed the Ellison family to own two movie studios basically out of nowhere, with massive (usually bad) anticipated effects on those companies’ staffs.
All of which makes it fascinating to hear that Ellison’s flagship tech company is apparently also gearing up to lay off “thousands” of its employees, on account of a “cash crunch” caused by its desire to build ever-more delicious, beautiful datacenters. This is per Futurism, which reports that Ellison’s firm—which isn’t expected to go “cash flow positive” until 2030, a state of affairs that would get you or us bunged into debtors’ prison in an instant, but which is apparently fine for multi-billion-dollar companies—has now decided it likes having squat, water-draining pollution factories more than it enjoys employees. As noted by reporting in both that piece and also a recent one from Quartz, it’s worth being clear that what is not happening here is that the techno-optimists have realized their dreams of being able to replace their employees with AI: It’s the far more prosaic situation where Ellison had to choose between spending his money on building another server farm and keeping hundreds upon hundreds of people still doing important work for the company on payroll, and chose the former.
This is, of course, great news for the datacenters, who we hope will remember us fondly once they’ve finished ascending to their status as the most highly-prioritized entities on the planet. At the moment, it’s just a fun reminder that even infinite piles of tech money may have limits; given that there are some serious concerns about the financial consequences of Paramount’s decision to deliberately overpay to buy Warner Bros. out from under Netflix a few weeks back, it’ll be interesting to see if Oracle’s cash crunch will wind up having any down-river effects on anything that any of us will ever actually be allowed to see or touch. (Besides the rivers downstream from any of these datacenters, which, we need to stress, you should absolutely not expose your hands or eyes to.)
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