AJ Tiarsmith

Mon, August 3, 2026 at 6:18 AM EDT 4 min read

Quick Read

• Oracle's stock has crashed over 55% from its September 2025 peak, erasing $494 billion in market value as fiscal 2026 capex hit $56 billion.

• Analyst Julien Garran contends the AI investment frenzy is 17 times larger than the dot-com bubble, with only NVIDIA generating actual profit.

• Ellison personally guaranteed $40.4 billion for his son's media merger, backed by Oracle shares now worth roughly half their value when signed.

• Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Oracle didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Larry Ellison has lost $207 billion in less than a year. His fortune peaked near $388 billion in September 2025, when Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) traded at $345.72 and briefly made him only the second person ever, after Elon Musk, to cross $400 billion. As of August 2, 2026, Bloomberg's Billionaires Index puts him at $181 billion, No. 7 globally, behind Mark Zuckerberg at $199 billion and just ahead of NVIDIA's Jensen Huang at $166 billion. Year-to-date, Ellison is down $66.0 billion, with most of the collapse arriving after Oracle's share price broke in June.

The Mechanics of the Crash

Oracle's market value has fallen by roughly $494 billion since peaking at $877.1 billion in September 2025. The stock closed at $121.38 on July 20, 2026, more than 55% off its September 2025 peak. Fiscal 2026 capital expenditures ballooned to $55.66 billion, past Oracle's own $50 billion guidance, flipping free cash flow to negative $23.7 billion.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Oracle didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today.

Oracle's Q4 8-K reported Remaining Performance Obligations of $638 billion, up 363% year-over-year, most locked into long-dated contracts that will not convert to cash for years. A large chunk ties to OpenAI, whose IPO has slipped to 2027. S&P Global downgraded Oracle's credit rating, warning the buildout might pay off long term but could weaken near-term financial position. Melius Research questioned whether Oracle's spending plans hold if OpenAI or Anthropic scale back demand for compute. Sitting behind all of it: Project Stargate, a plan to invest up to $500 billion in AI-focused data centers over four years.

The 17x Thesis

In October 2025, Julien Garran, partner at UK firm MacroStrategy Partnership, published a report arguing the AI investment frenzy is a "misallocation of capital" 17 times the size of the dot-com bubble and four times the size of the 2008 real-estate/subprime bubble. He called it "the biggest and most dangerous bubble the world has ever seen." His "golden rule" case: large language models are statistical word-prediction engines with architectural limits, coding tools reproduce rote patterns, and capability has hit a "scaling wall" since GPT-4 launched in March 2023.