By Adam Button
Publication Date: 2025-12-17 16:13:00
The turnaround in Oracle shares this year is one for the history books.
The company has been an AI high-flyer for most of the year, rising from $170 to $250 in March. Then it hit a peak for the ages in September following the earnings announcement.
If you ever needed a lesson in how quickly the AI narrative can turn against you, check out this table. We went from “Larry Ellison is the king of AI” to “Show me the money” in less than a quarter.
This jump to $345 made Larry Ellison briefly the richest man in the world. The narration was perfect. Ellison suggested Oracle as the backend for the entire AI revolution. The main number wasn’t sales; these were remaining performance obligations.
The backlog exploded to over $455 billion (and later $523 billion).
The market viewed the OpenAI partnership as a validation (and the turn against OpenAI has reversed that recently).
Multi-cloud deals with AWS and Google made Oracle appear essential and neutral.
The traders didn’t care about margins or capex, they just saw “OpenAI” and “Backlog” and clicked…
