Patryk Dagiel

🦔 Oracle laid off between 20,000 and 30,000 employees Tuesday morning, roughly 18% of its global workforce, via a single email sent at 6am EST with no prior warning. System access was revoked almost immediately after. The cuts are expected to free up $8-10 billion in cash flow. Oracle's stock has lost more than half its value since September 2025 and the company now carries over $124 billion in debt, up from $89 billion a year ago, with free cash flow running negative $10 billion last quarter. My Take Oracle posted a 95% jump in net income last quarter and still eliminated 18% of its workforce by email before most people finished their morning coffee. This is not a company in distress in the traditional sense. It's a company that made an enormous debt-funded bet on AI infrastructure and is now converting its workforce into cash flow to service that debt. We've covered Oracle's AI gamble for months. The $300 billion OpenAI deal through Stargate, $50 billion in capital expenditure this fiscal year, over $124 billion in total debt. Multiple US banks have pulled back from financing Oracle-linked data center projects. Bondholders have sued Oracle claiming it concealed how much additional debt the OpenAI deal would require. The credit default swap spread hit a three-year high earlier this year, meaning debt investors are genuinely nervous about getting paid back. The workers who got that 6am email built the products Oracle has monetized for decades. The bet that eliminated their jobs was made by people who were already paid regardless of how it turns out. That is the part of the AI infrastructure race that doesn't show up in the capex announcements. Hedgie🤗

The Bursting of China's NEV Bubble. China didn’t learn from its real estate collapse. It just replaced one bubble with another. First it was ghost cities. Now it’s ghost cars. For 13 years, Beijing flooded the EV sector with subsidies, pushing companies like BYD to global dominance. On the surface, it looks like success—millions of cars sold, world-leading production. But underneath? Nearly half the capacity is idle. Profit margins are collapsing. Price wars have turned into corporate suicide. On March 28, China Fund News reported that NEV giant BYD released a troubling financial report: Net profit: 32.6 billion RMB (−18% YoY) Chairman Wang Chuanfu admitted that the NEV industry is entering a “brutal elimination phase.” This signals a shift from explosive growth to a bloodbath across the entire sector. To absorb excess supply, automakers have resorted to brutal price wars. In May last year, BYD slashed prices by up to 34%, triggering industry-wide cuts and collapsing profit margins. By 2025: Only a handful of companies remained profitable Most automakers were operating at a loss. This is no longer competition—it’s mutual destruction. Here’s the scary part most people miss: Apartments can still be lived in after a crash. EVs can’t. These are rolling computers. If manufacturers fail, software dies, maps break, batteries malfunction. Your car doesn’t depreciate—it stops working. Meanwhile, trillions poured into charging stations and infrastructure risk becoming stranded assets overnight. China’s economy today is “ice and fire”—exports and tech look hot, everything else is freezing. If EVs were the last engine of growth, what happens when that engine stalls?