I am the VP of Workforce Economics at Oracle. We are worth $420 billion. On Tuesday, we sent 30,000 employees a termination email at 6 AM. Not 9. Not business hours. Six in the morning. They woke up to the word "eliminated." The email came from "Oracle Leadership." Not a manager. Not a name. Oracle Leadership. It said: "We are grateful for your dedication, hard work, and the impact you have made." By the time they read the word "grateful," their access to email, files, and Slack had already been revoked. The gratitude was the last Oracle communication they received. We did not eliminate the roles. We eliminated the salaries. In the same fiscal year, we filed 3,126 H-1B petitions to hire foreign workers. 436 this year alone. The roles are identical. The pay is not. An H-1B software engineer earns $87,000. The domestic median for the same work is $106,000. Eighty-three percent of H-1B workers are classified at entry-level wages for senior positions. The industry calls this a skills gap. It is a pay cut that requires a passport. The visa is tied to the employer. If the worker leaves, they lose their legal right to remain in the country. If they negotiate, they risk the same. If they organize, the sponsor declines to renew. That is retention. Our revenue this quarter is $17.2 billion. Up 22%. Net income up 95%. We have $553 billion in committed future contracts. Up 325%. These are not the numbers of a company that needs to lay anyone off. We took a $2.1 billion restructuring charge. That is the cost of the gratitude. It frees up $8 to $10 billion in annual cash flow. That cash services $156 billion in AI data centers we are building. Starting 2028, OpenAI pays us $82 million per day. Larry Ellison is worth $189 billion. He pledged $51 billion in Oracle shares as collateral for the Stargate AI venture. Announced at the White House. The stock rose 4% on Tuesday. The day of the 6 AM emails. Wall Street did not see 30,000 people. They saw the margin. Amazon laid off 30,000 since October. Filed thousands of H-1B petitions in the same window. This is not one company. This is the operating model. Fire the salary. Keep the role. Fill it with someone whose legal right to remain in the country depends on your continued sponsorship. Pay them less. They will not complain. They cannot. One employee's father worked at Oracle for 20 years. No phone call. No meeting. An email at 6 AM and a locked laptop. The role is still open. The people we fired are free. The people we hired are not.
