| A strange byproduct of the Oracle rally is the slew of internet explainers that all ask some version of the same question: “Who is Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the man who briefly replaced Elon Musk as the world’s richest person?” On one hand, the SEO-grab is not surprising. As Shuli Ren notes, Oracle — which is just a few years younger than Elon Musk — is “ancient” by Silicon Valley standards, so of course its founder is going to be portrayed as this long-forgotten old fogey. But this is LARRY ELLISON we’re talking about! A guy who casually owns a Hawaiian island. Who flies his own military jets. Who shattered his elbow in a high-speed bicycle crash. Who punctured his lung while bodysurfing. Who made a cameo in Iron Man 2. Who had a brief stint as a Malibu restauranteur. Who founded a hydroponic farming company. Who built the Indian Wells tennis facility. Who races yachts. Who cycles through vacation homes as fast as sports cars. The fact that we need to be reminded of his existence is itself a shock: Yesterday only cemented his place in history. Oracle’s shares surged 36%, the most since 1992, on news of AI-fueled cloud contracts. And it took a mere 40 minutes of trading for Ellison’s net worth to shoot up by $101 billion — a record advance in wealth accumulation. There’s no denying that the above chart screams “dot-com bubble,” something Oracle knows all too well. “Its stock price fell by over 80% after the bubble burst in 2000,” Shuli writes. “While Oracle’s share price has recovered decades later, it has lost a lot of its shine. No longer part of the Magnificent Seven, it has not been seen as a major beneficiary to the AI boom.” Until now, that is. Shuli says Oracle’s drastic jump raises an awkward question: Do sell-side analysts even know how to value a tech company in an era of intense innovation? They didn’t back when Pets.com was playing around with sock puppets, and we all know how that turned out. “Mapping out convincing future cash flows is made all the more complex by the fact that the AI world’s biggest players are private and thus don’t need to disclose their capital expenditures — unless they are fundraising,” she explains. “OpenAI, for instance, reportedly projected it will burn $115 billion through 2029, about $80 billion higher than its previous estimates. But how much of that incremental spending will go to Oracle is anyone’s guess.” It’s not just Oracle that’s at risk of living in a hyped-up fantasy land. Nvidia gained even more than Oracle on Wednesday, when the S&P 500 set yet another record, John Authers points out, “after the briefest of tremors in response to the appalling news of the assassination of the prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The rally since the gauge’s April 8 nadir is now 31.1%. It all seems dissonant.” Bonus AI Reading: Why is Silicon Valley betting on just one way to build artificial intelligence? — Parmy Olson Given the onslaught of news this week, you might have missed President Donald Trump’s speech on Monday in which he implied that domestic violence isn’t a crime. “Much lesser things — things that take place in the home — they call crime,” he said. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.” A little fight with the wife, huh? Someone ought to show the president this chart that Justin Fox made a month ago. Arguments and domestic violence are by far the most common circumstances in which murders and aggravated assaults take place: Indeed, Mary Ellen Klas says domestic violence must not be tolerated or brushed under the rug. “Trump’s comments shouldn’t be dismissed as just another 79-year-old elder with an old-school view. He may have grown up in an era when survivors were expected to endure abuse alone without legal protections or community support, but decades of legal and cultural progress have now made domestic violence unacceptable,” she writes. “I should know. My mother was on the front lines of that fight for progress.” Mary Louise Klas was an levelheaded, take-no-names judge on the bench of a family court in Minnesota, and the number of protective orders sought by victims of domestic abuse shocked her to her core. That experience led to “a lifelong crusade during which she worked with other domestic violence and human rights advocates to change the laws in Minnesota. She joined then-US Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife Sheila, and other advocates to push for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act and served on its first grant guidelines committee,” Mary Ellen writes. “The central principle of the work animating my mother, activists and senators like Wellstone was simple: Domestic violence is a crime that the community will not tolerate. It is not a private family problem but a societal one.” Trump, through his rhetoric and actions, has systematically sought to hamstring efforts that break the cycle of abuse. “But too many people know better,” Mary Ellen says. “We’ve made too much progress to let him drag us back.” | 
