Next TMT Talks:
We examine how greedy FIFA chief Gianni Infantino, fresh off a $15 billion World Cup triumph, may have taken things a bit too far. And we look at Oracle’s sub-800 credit report.

Navigating the waters of Manalapan, Fla., financial tsunami warning lights on the dash console are blinking red for Capt. Larry Ellison, backer of the biggest deal in media and entertainment ever, and also a central character in the IPO prospectuses of several key frontier LLM makers, all parties destined to narrative fates more likely to match than not.

The way these collapses often go, you can probably count most of us in, too, regardless of our feelings toward the 81-year-old MAGA oligarch.

The New York Times just declared the Oracle co-founder and chair the “face of the AI bubble.” That doesn’t mean he is or will be. But a bunch of key numbers for Ellison, his company and the broader financial markets, are all trending in the wrong direction, all at once.

That starts with Oracle’s stock price, which dipped below $115 a share on July 24, before finishing last week at $129.87. That’s a long way down from a peak of $308.66 back on September 19 of last year, just nine days after Oracle signed a $300 billion deal with OpenAI, with President Trump serving as liaison (and giving the whole thing a goofy “Project Stargate” moniker), to supply 4.5 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2028.