Platformonomics TGIF #99: September 12, 2025

I was forced to write not once but twice this week about Oracle’s shenanigans.

Tl;dr – you don’t get to book the revenue without spending the CAPEX, and Oracle is short on both cash and CAPEX deployment chops.

Remaining CAPEX Obligation

Why Can’t Oracle Afford Data Centers?

Meta’s $600 Billion Number: A Comedy in Three Acts

Act I: Meta will invest $600B in AI!!!

Act II: Meta will invest $600B???

Act III: Founder mode relies on its own branch of non-linear, non-GAAP parallel universe mathematics.

“The way that we talk about these things reflects accurately that one of us is a CFO and one of us is a builder and tech visionary — who runs one of the largest companies in the world,” Li said, getting a laugh from the crowd of investors and analysts.

I remain skeptical of Meta’s AI mulligan absent some plausible path to new line(s) of business that provide a return commensurate with this magnitude of investment. Ever better ad targeting doesn’t pay for this. They have no cloud business today to monetize AI and would face Elon-esque credibility challenges entering that business.

Tuesday’s Oracle earnings call paid for this and then some.

Any wagers on what kind of antitrust scrutiny this deal would get?

Don’t we think Europeans would prefer to speak English anyway?

“Again”