Oracle Just Cut Thousands of Jobs While Its Stock Hits Record…

Oracle spent the past two years telling anyone who would listen that it was an artificial intelligence company now. The database giant from Austin wanted investors to see it as a serious challenger to Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud wars, and Wall Street happily played along. The stock is up roughly 60 percent over the past year. Larry Ellison is richer than he has ever been. And yet, this week, thousands of Oracle employees found out they were being let go anyway. The layoffs, which rolled out across cloud infrastructure, engineering, and support teams, are expected to affect somewhere between two and three thousand workers, according to internal communications and reports circulating on LinkedIn. Some employees learned their fate when their badge stopped working. Others found out during a scheduled 15-minute call with a manager they had never met. A few discovered they were locked out of their email before anyone bothered to tell them anything at all. There was no company-wide memo. There was no tearful all-hands. There was just silence, and then a severance packet. Here is the part that makes people furious: Oracle is not struggling. Its cloud revenue is growing at a healthy clip. Its remaining performance obligations, the fancy term for booked future business, recently topped $130 billion. The company is spending billions building data centers to serve AI customers. It is hiring aggressively in some divisions even as it cuts in others. This is not a company fighting for survival. This is a company deciding that certain employees are no longer worth the cost. That decision is not unique to Oracle, of course. Tech has been doing this dance for three years now. But Oracle's version stings because of how nakedly it exposes the logic. The stock is soaring, the executive suite is celebrating, and the people who built the products that made all of this possible are being shown the door with a link to a benefits portal and a reminder to return their laptops. The timing is also brutal for the workers themselves. The tech job market is not what it was in 2021. Thousands of talented engineers, program managers, and support specialists are now competing for a shrinking pool of openings, many of which pay less than what they were making at Oracle. Recruiters say the volume of qualified applicants for every posting is staggering. Being laid off from a profitable company in a strong economy is a special kind of insult, because there is no story you can tell yourself about the business needing to tighten its belt. Oracle will say this is about focus and efficiency. It will point to its AI investments and its long-term strategy. It will note that severance is generous by industry standards. And all of that may be true. But the people packing up their desks this week are not thinking about long-term strategy. They are thinking about mortgage payments, health insurance, and how to explain to their kids why mom or dad is home in the middle of the day. **The bottom line:** A company can be profitable, growing, and still decide you are expendable. Oracle just proved that again, and the only people who will remember it are the ones who got the call.