r/TheDailyChaos

Source: https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2026-epidemic-of-ebola-disease-in-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-and-uganda-determined-a-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern

Now let me explain what the bulls aren't telling you and why this will end HORRIBLY:

Oracle's non-current debt has ballooned to $124.7 billion. Up from $85.3 billion a year ago.

A 46% increase in 12 months.

Total liabilities sit at $206 billion against shareholders' equity of $39 billion. That's a 5-to-1 leverage ratio on a company being pitched as a "safe" infrastructure play.

But that $124.7 billion isn't even the full picture...

Oracle has been using project financing structures (loans repaid from projected future cashflow) to keep tens of billions more in borrowing off its balance sheet entirely. So when analysts quote Oracle's debt load, they're UNDERSTATING the actual exposure by a meaningful margin.

Interest expense jumped 32% YOY. Free cash flow is negative $24.7 billion on a trailing basis. The company is spending $48 billion a year in capex while generating roughly $17 billion in operating cash flow.

They issued $43 billion in senior notes in 9 months. They are borrowing at a pace that would make a leveraged buyout firm nervous.

And what did they get for all that spending? They fired 30,000 people.

On March 31st, Oracle sent an email at 6 AM to tens of thousands of employees telling them their roles were eliminated. 18% of the global workforce gone in a single morning.

TD Cowen estimates the layoffs save $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. Which tells you everything about the math:

Oracle can't fund $50 billion in AI capex AND keep 162,000 people on payroll. So the people went.

Net income was up 95% last quarter. The stock is still down 47% from its high.

Mr. Market is telling you something.

The earnings look great on paper partly because Oracle extended the useful life of its servers to 6 years, reducing depreciation expense by billions.

I've been flagging this accounting game across the hyperscalers for months. It flatters the income statement while the balance sheet quietly deteriorates.

Now let's talk about the $553 billion in Remaining Performance Obligations that every bull cites as the "reason" to own this stock:

Roughly $300 billion of that is a SINGLE contract with OpenAI through the Stargate project. Revenue doesn't start flowing until 2027. And OpenAI itself expects to lose over $167 billion through 2028 even if it hits $100 billion in annual revenue.

So Oracle is borrowing $125+ billion to build data centers for a customer that cannot even fund its own operations.

And the data centers themselves are significantly behind schedule:

The flagship Stargate campus in Abilene has been under construction since mid-2024. 2 years later, only 2 of 8 planned buildings are operational, covering about 200 megawatts of the planned 1.2 gigawatts.

The remaining Stargate sites across Wisconsin, New Mexico, Michigan, and other locations are in the earliest stages of development.

The total estimated cost to build out Oracle's 7 gigawatts of planned Stargate capacity runs around $340 billion.

And lenders are already getting nervous.

The Wall Street Journal reported that additional capacity at Abilene originally earmarked for OpenAI ended up going to Microsoft instead - because the banks financing the build were uncomfortable with their credit exposure to OpenAI as the ultimate customer.

When your LENDERS don't trust your tenant's ability to pay, then there's SERIOUS issue.

And by the time those data centers are fully built, the GPUs inside them will already be approaching obsolescence anyway.

Nvidia releases new architectures annually. Each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. The hardware goes obsolete in 3 years but the debt used to buy it gets repaid over a much longer horizon.

The AI infrastructure buildout is a treadmill, not a revolution. Oracle is the purest expression of that thesis.

- $206 billion in reported liabilities.

- Billions more hidden off-balance-sheet.

- Negative $25 billion in free cash flow.

- 30,000 people fired to fund the capex.

- A single unprofitable customer behind over half the backlog.

- Data centers years behind schedule.

And 35 analysts saying buy.

This doesn't sound right, does it?

- George Noble.

In turn, the girls use the money they earn to order food and makeup products, thereby creating more work for the couriers.

It's the strangest and most interdependent job cycle in the world, born in the age of social media.