Larry Ellison Enrolls in Jack Dorsey’s AI Masterclass, Uncle Sam Misplaces 92,000 Jobs (AGAIN)

Hey there Folks - a look back on the week with the Team an Bullseye.

We’ve got Larry Ellison sacrificing employees to compete in the billionaire AI contest, Oracle shareholders suddenly developing “alligator arms”, and Ray Dalio’s recession club getting fresh chart material.

Let’s get started…

-Larry Ellison appears to have enrolled in the school of Jack Dorsey…

Well… turns out building an AI empire (and committing a “holy overpay” to let your nepobaby son swipe Warner Bros from Netflix) costs slightly more than Larry Ellison’s collection of Hawaiian islands.

In a move about as predictable as every Liam Neeson movie, Oracle is planning to cut thousands of jobs as the company grapples with a very 2026 problem: spending a crazy amount of money trying to keep up with your billionaire friends in the AI contest.

Because while the tech world loves talking about trillion-dollar AI opportunities… the actual cost of building the machines that power it looks like a bottomless pit where shareholder money goes to die.

And right now, Oracle is standing there with a shovel.

Oracle has been going full “build it and they will come” mode on AI infrastructure. The cloud company is pouring billions into new data centers designed to handle the YUGE computing demands of AI workloads for customers like OpenAI.

Allegedly, he wants people to stop thinking of his company as “that dusty enterprise database from the early 2000s” and start viewing it as a serious rival to Amazon and Microsoft.

It’s a simple plan with a small problem… those giant AI data centers cost a “(what the heck) is this a real number?” amount of money.

Case in point, the suits now expect Oracle’s cloud division to push cash flow negative for several years, with the payoff not arriving until around 2030. (Sam Altman’s somewhere like: “bro, really stole my whole flow.”)

To help cover the bill, “Luxury Larry” recently said he plans to raise as much as $50 billion through a mix of debt and equity. But even that might not be enough to keep things comfortable in the short term, which is why Oracle is reaching for the same lever every tech company right now is pulling: layoffs.

According to reports, the job cuts could begin as soon as this month and will hit multiple divisions across the company.

Remember, investors were initially pretty pumped about Oracle’s AI masterplan. The stock jumped 61% in 2024 and another 20% the following year as the market bought into the company’s cloud ambitions.

Then the check hit the table and shareholders got a bad case of “alligator arms.”

Oracle isn’t exactly blazing a new trail here. Just last week, Block laid off nearly half its workforce, with Jack Dorsey pointing out the robots are pretty good at those jobs anyway.

Earnings results will post Tuesday, which should offer a clearer look at just how expensive this AI land grab is becoming.

Until then, Ellison seems more than happy to keep the spending spree rolling.

-Huge day for the “Team Doomer” industrial complex…

Well… sometimes we’re all reminded why we can’t have nice things.

This time it just so happens to come in the form of a horrendously down-bad jobs report.

According to new data from the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, which is… not exactly the direction economists were hoping for.

Especially since the brain trust surveyed by the geniuses over at Bloomberg had been expecting a gain of 55,000 jobs. You don’t need a PhD in macroeconomics to realize that’s a 147,000-job miss. Safe to say the economists’ group chat probably got real quiet this morning.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, which isn’t catastrophic by historical standards… but it’s definitely moving in the wrong direction.

Even more concerning? The share of unemployed workers who’ve been out of work 27 weeks or longer climbed to 25.3% of the total. Translation: once people lose a job, it’s taking longer to find another one. Not exactly the “soft landing” the Fed keeps assuring everyone is still on the menu.

And in case you thought the damage was limited to February, this report was ugly enough that the government also reached back in time and shaved prior months lower.

January’s previously reported gain of 130,000 jobs got trimmed by 4,000. Meanwhile December’s report took an even bigger hit.

That month was originally reported as +48,000 jobs. It has now been revised to a loss of 17,000. Add it all together and the last two reports just erased 69,000 jobs from the historical record. Sidenote: Where are they getting these horrible accountants?

To make things even weirder, healthcare (one of the few sectors that’s been reliably adding jobs) actually lost 28,000 positions in February.

A big chunk of that drop likely came from a strike involving roughly 31,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Hawaii, which temporarily pulled them off payrolls during the survey window. Without that strike, the headline number might’ve looked slightly less ugly.

But the bigger story hiding in this dungpile of a report?

The U.S. job market has become extremely dependent on healthcare and social assistance hiring. When that engine blows a gasket… look out below.

So where does that leave us?

Well, the question now becomes whether this report is just a random statistical glitch… or the first crack in what has been a suspiciously durable labor market.

Because if job losses start showing up regularly in the months ahead… Ray Dalio and his recession enthusiast friends will be out here overlaying every chart they can find with 2008.

The Team at Bullseye Trades