Edit: it's a Dilbert reference. PHB thinks he needs a SQL DB and Dilbert asks what color he wants.
If Oracle starts charging the dozens (tens of thousands?) of us that signed up for Pay-as-you-go just to be able to provision a VM, I'm deleting my account.
But in all seriousness, Oracle is a terrible company that has scammed governments and corporations. Not really surprised. Bryan Cantrill said it best [0]. Oracle is "morally bankrupt," Larry Ellison prioritizes profits over ethics and innovation. I'm not surprised if the stock price was forced to fall by Ellison because of his July sells [1]
1. He dumped $322 million (2.25 million shares) in mid July in TWO days signalling lack of confidence
2. These shares were spread out with different sizes, to probably minimize the market impact
3. The sells still pushed the stock prices down
4. Then the "cost-cutting" and OCI layoffs happen
Obviously correlation isn't causation, but Oracle clearly doesn't care about their cloud, just MONEY, HA!
Larry Ellison's Stock Sales - July 15-16, 2024
Date Quantity Price % Change Running Total
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jul 16 87,127 $143.17 -0.01% 1,145,732,353
Jul 16 1,037,873 $142.53 -0.09% 1,145,819,480
Jul 15 579,765 $142.64 -0.05% 1,146,277,588
Jul 15 81,871 $143.45 -0.01% 1,146,195,717
Jul 15 237,491 $144.61 -0.02% 1,145,958,226
Jul 15 191,252 $145.34 -0.02% 1,145,766,974
Jul 15 34,621 $146.30 -0.00% 1,145,732,353
I used https://github.com/jpetazzo/ampernetacle to provision resources and it’s been the “brain” for my personal cloud for this whole time. It doesn’t run much, basically ArgoCD, Tailscale operator and a CoreDNS deployment that does internal routing, but heck, it’s a free highly available control plane for an internal homelab. No other cloud even comes close to OCI’s offering, if you were to provision the same on other clouds it would be minimum $50 USD+ per month
Once it finally dies I’ll probably just go find some low cost provider like Hetzner or OVH to run this. I’m purposefully not really doing much on that instance as a result because I know that my small little bundle of terraform that builds out the vm’s will eventually need to be rewritten, so I’ve also purposefully avoided using any OCI specific constructs for my implementation.
That repo looks cool, if I really wanted to learn Kubernetes. My usage right now is for running inference on CPU RAMs because I refuse to upgrade my 980-ti, so I'm not sure it would work for me
I have only had one 1 cent charge since I got it because I provisioned some volume storage before I realized that it would incur costs.
If you just use the repo I linked and otherwise never touch resources or auto provision anything on the infra side you’ll never be charged.
I would highly recommend this use case for learning kube, but also it’s kind of limiting because several things you might want to use with kube will also incur additional costs. You can avoid the costs if you simply just don’t do anything that triggers a cost event, but people who are not familiar with how kube can provision infra resources under the hood might footgun themselves and wire into a cloud load balancer instead of using MetalLB for instance.
Probably inference is not really a good use case here, the compute they give is considered extremely good in terms of free, but still kind of anemic for inference use cases.
I only run the tiny models for fun (the CPU inference is enough) and any complex coding tasks go through GPT or Claude. Mainly just using the one instance as another backup server, run scrapers, host a bunch of containers, and experiment with networking services. I don't see a reason to split up my one instance, but maybe in the future.
Deepseek-coder is pretty slow, even with the quantized models.
The parent only paid $0.01. Even $0.10 should be fine, even if you strongly dislike Oracle: the cost to Oracle for charging your card $0.10 is more than that, so they're actually losing money by charging you such a small amount!
Lots of locked-in enterprises, but everybody in tech hates them.
I think they're a future IBM, but it'll take a long time, perhaps decades, to get there (once an ERP, database system, or cloud provider gets into a big enterprise, it's not leaving again soon).
They have rock solid earnings [https://valustox.com/ORCL] but they're trading at high valuations given their low growth rate and modest dividend.
I am neither buying nor shorting them right now.
He uses a Blind Trust.
Due to how many investments he has that could create SEC insider trading issues, Larry has a Blind Trust that sells his stock as they see best fit without his influence.
So this wasn't Larry selling $322M in stock. It was his Blind Trust that did.
Also, he's not hurting for cash. He gets an annual dividend of ~$1.6B from Oracle due to him owning 42% of he company.
Trump put his kids in charge of the trust. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-children-busine...
Romney had a friend handle it. https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/mitt-romneys-blind-trust-blin...
1. Insulating a blind trust from an insider's reactive knowledge of changes. ("A secret CIA report says Latveria is going to open its borders to trade.")
2. Insulating a blind trust from an insider's proactive policy decisions which causes changes. ("I've always told my friends that we should try to trade with Latveria.")
In other words, it's not really a "blind" trust if it makes investment decisions knowing that the politician will cause certain sectors or businesses to perform better or worse.
1. These were planned exercises of stock options that were expiring on July 24, 2024 [1]
2. Two transactions of 1,125,000 options each were exercised at $40.47 [1]
3. The shares were then sold in declining price blocks to minimize market impact
4. All forms are signed by either Paul T. Marinelli (trustee) [2][3] or Aimee Weast (Attorney in fact for Ellison) [1]
5. Ellison is explicitly listed as "Officer" and "10% Owner" [1]
Go to page 4 to see these documents: [0] https://investor.oracle.com/sec-filings/default.aspx
July 17, 2024 - Form4 - Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership
[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001341439/1c6945f...
July 16, 2024 - Form144 - Report of proposed sale of securities
[2] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001341439/3bc4831...
July 15, 2024 - Form144 - Report of proposed sale of securities
[3] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001341439/0b76c30...
While you're correct that Ellison isn't hurting for cash, the evidence suggests these were scheduled options exercises ahead of expiration, not discretionary blind trust trading.
I'd encourage you to review the actual SEC filings before making claims about how Larry handles his investments...
And as you found, it's managed by a trust.
So I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Are you suggesting someone should let their stock expire ($0) that's worth $322M?
It seems like you have an axe to grind and I don't understand why.
That's all I'll say on this topic.
You specifically claimed "Larry has a Blind Trust that sells his stock as they see best fit without his influence." The SEC filings directly contradict this:
1. This is a Revocable Trust, and while technically a blind trust can be revocable, the filings show this trust is actively managed with Ellison's involvement:
- The transactions were specifically timed around options expiration
- The sales were carefully structured in declining price blocks
- The trust uses Ellison's authority as Officer/10% Owner
- Forms are signed by his Attorney
2. These weren't discretionary sales by trustees "as they see best fit" - they were planned options exercises with a clear purpose and strategy.
I don't have an axe to grind. I'm just correcting a mischaracterization about how Larry manages his Oracle holdings. Accuracy matters when discussing corporate governance and SEC filings, especially for a company as significant as Oracle.
If this were a true blind trust they would've exercised the options at $40.47, immediately sell at market (~$143), and net ~$100 profit per share. Instead they did price stepping, and used Larry's Officer status under the pretense of independence.
That is correct, but it also means that this trust is not tax-advantaged.
Their cloud offerings at hobbyist level is vastly superior to any of the big clouds. Just objectively better.
Yet they keep nuking hobbyist accounts with little rhyme or reason as to who gets hit. So nobody builds anything remotely serious on it.
Congrats Oracle, you've managed to get the worst of both world: Incur the cost of free tier while ensuring future high value customers don't trust it.
At any rate, I've had mine since the start of Covid Times and never had problems provisioning an instance.
I think in these situations you have to imagine what would be sustainable if every user did the same. If you exceed that, you’re probably going to meet some friction.
I used it as a gitlab server, it was regularly updated, there were no other services running. It wasn't even used intensively, maybe 2-3 pushes a day. And yet, one day they just closed everything.
No suprise as everybody was warning me they would do it but still it felt very weird.
An Oracle hobbyist is a (sad-o-)masochist ;)