Oracle (ORCL) billionaire and well-known yachting expert Larry Ellison might spend his summer aboard his 160-foot superyacht dubbed the Musashi.
But, for lack of better terms, his stock has sunk to the ocean floor, and it’s unclear what will bring it back afloat.
Quick insight: Oracle stock has now plunged 64% from its September 2025 all-time high, a brutal total market cap loss of almost $600 billion. The shares are down 50% over the past year.
Over the past five years, Oracle shares have underperformed the S&P 500 (^GSPC): a 40% gain for Oracle compared to a 74% gain for the benchmark index. For perspective, Microsoft’s (MSFT) stock is up 43%, while Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) has advanced 175% over the same period.
The crash has vaporized a good deal of Ellison’s net worth while he’s backstopping his son David Ellison’s big bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) from Paramount (PSKY).
Ellison’s net worth peaked near $388 billion in September 2025, making him the second-richest person behind his friend and Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX) CEO Elon Musk. By July 13, Ellison’s net worth had fallen to roughly $175 billion, a decline of approximately $213 billion in under 10 months, dropping him to No. 8 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The why: Investors are questioning whether Oracle’s AI-fueled growth expectations have become too aggressive.
While Oracle continues to sign large cloud infrastructure deals and benefit from demand for AI computing capacity, the market is concerned that the stock’s valuation already reflects years of strong growth.
There are also concerns that Oracle will need to spend heavily on data centers, networking equipment, and power infrastructure to meet customer demand, which could pressure margins and cash flow in the near term. Additionally, competition from Microsoft Azure, Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, and Google Cloud remains intense, making it difficult to predict how much market share Oracle can ultimately capture.
Somewhat bizarrely, the Wall Street analyst community has stayed unapologetically bullish on Oracle with a steady drumbeat of reiterated Buy ratings. Yahoo Finance AlphaSpace data shows that about 86% of the sell-side analysts that cover Oracle have either a Strong Buy or Buy rating on the stock.
It’s unclear what this group is looking at, but surely it hasn’t been an Oracle stock chart over the past year.
Bottom line: It will take more than one better-than-expected quarter to begin rebuilding Oracle’s stock price. And even then, Oracle has to prove its pace of investment in AI is warranted.
