Oracle’s Meteoric Ascent: A Devil’s Earnings Dance

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Shares of Oracle (ORCL) executed a leap that made the stock market gods blink on Wednesday, soaring 41.3% in early trading. By 10:42 a.m. ET, the stock clung to a 39.1% ascent, a performance that would have left even the devil himself scribbling notes in the margins of his infernal ledger.

The catalyst? A quarterly report so resplendent with numbers it could have lit up the Kremlin. Revenue of $14.9 billion-up 12%-and adjusted EPS of $1.47 (a 6% rise) arrived like a telegram from a long-lost uncle, brimming with unearned optimism. Yet the true marvel was not the numbers themselves, but the shadow they cast: a $455 billion backlog of contracts, a figure so vast it might have made Stalin reconsider his Five-Year Plan.

The start of something big

Oracle’s fiscal 2026 first quarter (ended Aug. 31) revealed a company in the throes of metamorphosis. Cloud infrastructure revenue, that modern-day alchemy of silicon and silicon, surged 55% to $3.3 billion. One might imagine the devil himself, cap in hand, queuing for a demo of Oracle’s AI-powered servers, muttering, “Perhaps I should’ve invested in cloud storage back in 1941.”

Analysts, those modern-day soothsayers with spreadsheets, had penciled in $15 billion in revenue and $1.48 in EPS. Oracle, in its infinite generosity, missed these targets by a hair’s breadth. Yet investors, like peasants at a tsar’s banquet, clapped and cheered. After all, missing expectations by $100 million while booking a backlog larger than the GDP of Belgium is the financial equivalent of winning a war by losing a single skirmish.

The real drama unfolded in the RPO-a number so staggering it defies metaphor. Four multibillion-dollar contracts, like four golden eggs laid by a mythical goose, pushed Oracle’s backlog to $455 billion. One might wonder if the contracts were signed in triplicate, or if the ink was still wet on the treaties of Versailles.

And then there was the five-year plan: a roadmap so audacious it could have been written by a madman with a Bloomberg terminal. Cloud revenue to hit $144 billion by 2029? That is not growth. That is geological tectonics, the kind that makes continents collide. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-those titans of the digital age-will soon find themselves in a chess match with a player who sees the board as a Rubik’s Cube.

  • Fiscal 2027: $32 billion in cloud revenue, a sum that makes the Czar’s ruble look quaint.
  • Fiscal 2028: $73 billion, a figure so round it could roll off a cliff.
  • Fiscal 2029: $144 billion, a number that might require a new decimal place.

This is not mere market share. It is a revolution in the making, a quiet coup led by algorithms and APIs. Oracle’s legacy businesses, those anachronisms of the pre-cloud era, now resemble the Romanovs-wealthy, but increasingly irrelevant.

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Oracle’s AI and cloud focus is paying off

CEO Safra Catz, that sphinx of corporate strategy, declared in a press release that demand for Oracle’s cloud “continued to accelerate.” One might imagine her speaking to a room full of investors who had just discovered fire. “We expect to ink several additional multi-billion-dollar customers,” she intoned, as if announcing the arrival of spring in Siberia. And RPO? “Likely to exceed half-a-trillion dollars.” A figure so large it might require a new denomination of currency.

With the stock now trading at 42 times next year’s earnings, investors have priced in a future where Oracle’s cloud empire rivals the breadth of the Tsar’s Siberia. Whether this is folly or foresight remains to be seen. But in the grand theater of capitalism, few plays are as thrilling as a company that turns its backlog into a stock price. 🚀

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2025-09-10 18:59