Oracle (ORCL) shares slumped with the weary inevitability of a Victorian chimney sweep at a health retreat, shedding 5% by 11 a.m. ET. Investors, it seems, are reconsidering their infatuation with this venerable database custodian turned accidental AI aristocrat via its liaison with OpenAI. (One might reasonably ask how a company whose heyday coincided with the invention of the floppy disk became a linchpin of modern artificial intelligence, but then again, so did your grandmother’s VHS player once hold the fate of home entertainment in its magnetic head.)
And why?
Like a cosmic punchline, the answer involves neither artificial intelligence nor databases, but rather a short-video app that arrived like a comet through the atmosphere of human attention spans – TikTok. (The algorithmic engine powering this particular comet, it turns out, is what happens when you cross a neural network with a hyperactive squirrel on espresso.)
Oracle’s Sisyphean Bargain: Renting the Black Box
A week ago, whispers emerged that the proposed TikTok U.S. carve-up was gaining momentum – whispers that named Oracle as the designated bag carrier for this digital alchemy. Today, outlets like AP report that Silver Lake Partners (a firm whose name suggests both fiscal prudence and a lingering fondness for 1980s power ballads) plus media magnates Rupert Murdoch and Michael Dell might join Larry Ellison’s band in funding “TikTok U.S.”, 20% of which remains in the clutches of Beijing’s ByteDance.
The real kicker? Oracle and co. might not own TikTok at all, but merely license a copy of its algorithm – a bit like renting the Mona Lisa’s smile while the Louvre keeps the canvas. The consortium could theoretically tweak data inputs or audit outputs, but the algorithm’s beating heart remains as impenetrable as a vault built by Rube Goldberg. (One imagines ByteDance’s engineers cackling into their boba tea while drafting the licensing terms, which reportedly include clauses like “Thou Shalt Not Reverse-Engineer This, You Plebeians.”)
Buying the Emperor’s New Code
Investors today are doing the financial equivalent of poking a suspiciously warm pudding – if the TikTok deal amounts to a black-box algorithm lease, Oracle’s $75-per-earnings-dollar valuation looks less like a shrewd investment and more like paying full price for a mystery box at a magician’s garage sale.
While domestic data custody satisfies U.S. regulators’ jitters, owning a “licensed” algorithm without source code access is akin to purchasing a car with no keys, a cookbook with blank pages, or a symphony composed entirely of rests. (The latter, admittedly, would be preferable to most modern Christmas music.) Without full code transparency, Oracle’s supposed AI windfall becomes a gilded mousetrap – aesthetically pleasing, but unlikely to catch anything more sophisticated than crumbs.
In the grand tapestry of corporate folly, this deal risks joining the pantheon of “almosts” – like Betamax, New Coke, or the time someone tried to sell blockchain-based toasters. Then again, in a universe where TikTok’s algorithm is both the Holy Grail and Schrödinger’s Cat, perhaps Oracle’s gamble is merely the latest chapter in capitalism’s eternal quest to monetize the inexplicable. 🌀
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2025-09-23 19:12