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JD Bunchajumpscares

@jdbunchanumbers.bsky.social

Oh man, I just remembered AOLTimeWarner.

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · Apr 23

Tomorrow's Premium: OpenAI needs to raise or make $852bn through 2030 to pay for the compute costs associated with Stargate and other data centers. If it fails, Oracle dies, and destroys Larry Ellison's wealth.

Here's $10 off annual.
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If OpenAI Fails To Raise $852 Billion In Revenue, Funding and Debt Throughout The Next 4 Years, The Stargate Data Center Project Will Kill Oracle
To make the Stargate data center project happen, Oracle has had to sign deals with effectively every major bank, investment fund and asset manager in both America and Asia, and needs at least another $150 billion just to start earning revenue from OpenAI.

For that revenue to be possible, OpenAI must grow to a pace and scale unseen in the history of software. If you believe reports (I don’t!), OpenAI grew from $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024 to $13.1 billion in 2025, or roughly 3.5X year over year - for it to reach its goals, it will have to grow by 250% at minimum, every single year, without fail, and as it does so continue to raise funding at a pace and scale beyond anything in the history of business, let alone the tech industry.

This isn’t me being a hater or a skeptic or a pessimist, but doing the very simple mathematics that someone at a major business publication or perhaps Michael Burry should’ve thought of had he not had his head so far up Jack Clark of Anthropic’s ass that he can recite Claude’s constitution.

Oracle’s Stargate data centers are both a horrifying mistake and only made possible through catastrophic failures of due diligence and underwriting. Every single bank and asset manager that’s put money behind this farce deserves regulatory investigations, shareholder lawsuits and to be blackballed by the entire finance industry, because there is no way that OpenAI can actually afford to pay for its compute, and it doesn’t look like Oracle even has a way to build it.

I’ll repeat the numbers: the 7.1GW of Stargate data centers in progress will make around $75 billion in annual revenue on completion, and cost more than $340 billion in total. Oracle’s free cash flow was negative $24.7 billion, and its other business lines are plateauing, making its negative-to-low margin cloud business its only growth engine…

As I covered in the Hater’s Guide To Oracle, its business is, in some ways, systemically-necessary, meaning that at the very least its database business would be sold to either a consortium of investors or a large company like Microsoft.

And its collapse would only happen after one of the most brutal declines in shareholder value in modern history. Oracle’s only saving grace for the last few years has been the growth of its cloud infrastructure division, with investors heavily banking on its GPU business for future guidance.

Once that story collapses, so too will any faith in the value of its stock.

The Collapse of Stargate and Oracle Would Destroy Larry Ellison’s Wealth, As He’s Pledged $60 Billion In Oracle Shares As Collateral On Loans
That’s a very bad thing for Larry Ellison, who holds around 40% of Oracle’s shares and receives a dividend of around $1.4 billion a quarter as a result, especially as he’s backed the $111 billion Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger deal with $45.7 billion of that as an equity commitment from the Ellison Trust (the Ellison family investment arm which holds his Oracle shares) with Larry himself guaranteeing the amount, with $24 billion of those funds likely coming from the Middle East.

This leaves the Ellison family with around $12 billion left to fund the deal. Depending on how liquid the trust is, it could foreseeably fund that in cash - but if Ellison is a little light, he might have to take out further margin loans on his Oracle stock.

Yes, I used the word “further.” Ellison has already pledged 346 million shares of his Oracle stock - or around $61.5 billion - “to secure certain personal indebtedness, including various lines of credit,” meaning “many big, beautiful loans against his Oracle shares.” which IFR estimated back in September (when Oracle’s stock price was much higher) could allow him to secure as much as $21.4 billion in debt at a (they say “conservative”) loan-to-value ratio of 20%, and that’s assumin…

The collapse of Oracle would be horrendous for its customers - many of whom are in the public sector - and for those unfortunate to still work there. It will likely involve firesales of assets like Cerner (and the greater Oracle Health vertical), or even breaking up the entire company.

And everything rides on Sam Altman’s ability to raise funding and make revenue to the tune of $852 billion in the space of 4 years.

Good luck, Larry!

April 24, 2026 at 1:26 AM

bgwitt311.bsky.social

@bgwitt311.bsky.social

#AOLTimeWarner stock certificates were found, and will be shared

December 9, 2025 at 8:53 PM

Brandon Sheffield

@brandon.insertcredit.com

@mikemcmahan.bsky.social Not sure if you'd be privy to this but do you know if there's gonna be a blu-ray compilation of Lower Decks after season 5? I would like to have it all before disney/paramount/AOLTIMEWARNER decides to hit the delete button

October 3, 2024 at 11:38 PM

Justin Falcone

@justinfalcone.com

Hmmm I was kind of hoping that Warner Bros would sell to, like, OpenAI or something, to fully recapitulate the dotcom boom's AOLTimeWarner acquisition

December 5, 2025 at 1:03 PM

degrassifan.bsky.social

@degrassifan.bsky.social

#aol #aoltimewarner

Culture Crave 🍿 @culturecrave.co · Aug 12

AOL is shutting down its dial-up internet after 34 years on September 30

August 12, 2025 at 5:43 AM

bgwitt311.bsky.social

@bgwitt311.bsky.social

#AOLTimeWarner stock is also rising

December 9, 2025 at 5:25 PM

Kierkegaarden Cop

@joshsteich.bsky.social

AOLTimeWarner

The warning is literally in the name!

Karl Bode @karlbode.com · Oct 20

$7.7 billion for MMA rights, $150 million for Bari Weiss' shitty little troll blog, however much it cost them to grab a chunk of TikTok, AND potentially $60 billion for whatever's left of Time Warner

trying to buy your way to media domination always ends well

ask the fine folks at AT&T

Breakingviews - Warner Bros will probably cost Paramount $60 billion

David Ellison’s empire wants to buy his larger rival before David Zaslav splits HBO and studios from CNN and other networks.

www.reuters.com

October 20, 2025 at 3:06 PM

Scott

@merseytart.com

Remember that brief period of AOLTimeWarner at the end of episodes of Friends? What a time that was.

October 30, 2025 at 8:34 AM

Noah J. Nelson, Immersonaut Prime

@noahjnelson.com

The funniest outcome of the Streaming Wars would be AOLTimeWarner III.

But anything is better than Paramount winning.

DiscussingFilm @discussingfilm.net · Dec 1

Netflix’s new bid to buy Warner Bros is a mostly cash offer.

The company is arranging a mega-loan to be able to buy WB

(Source: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...)