zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
Any consolidation like this seems like a negative for consumers. But at least it wasn’t bought by Larry Ellison, as was considered very likely (assuming this merger gets approved, in the current administration you never know).

From a Hacker News perspective, I wonder what this means for engineers working on HBO Max. Netflix says they’re keeping the company separate but surely you’d be looking to move them to Netflix backend infrastructure at the very least.

>>afavou+Jd
Off topic, but I am boggled that Larry Ellison came back to “richest man in the world” this year.

For all the enormous Reach of Facebook adverts, Apple, Microsoft breadth of products, Tesla and SpaceX and Twitter, Amazon’s massive cloud dominance, the AI boom for nVidia…

Oracle?!

“On September 10, 2025, Ellison was briefly the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$393 billion.

In June 2020, Ellison was reported to be the seventh-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $66.8 billion”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

>>jodrel+K81
Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction).

In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted,

- Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin

- Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!).

- Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings.

- AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially)

- SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space)

- Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking.

- Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money.

No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.

>>shadow+vf1
> "Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)"

Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup.

Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side.

Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years??

> "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful"

Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet.

[1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-...