Add Elon’s Buddy Larry Ellison To The Creditors List Of Those That Twitter Is Refusing To Pay

We already knew that Twitter had stopped paying its cloud computing bills from Google and Amazon as Elon continues his “pursuit of profitability” that he himself destroyed in Twitter (remember, Twitter was profitable in 16 of the previous 20 quarters before Elon took over at a much higher run rate, before Elon drove away somewhere around half of the advertising revenue of the company while simultaneously saddling it with massive debt). I may not be a massively successful business man, but I’m having trouble with the business logic of driving away half of revenue for no clear reason, while increasing the company’s expenses through unnecessary debt financing, combined with trying to make up the difference by breaching contracts left and right.

Apparently one of new CEO Linda Yaccarino’s first orders of business was to call up Thomas Kurian, who runs Google Cloud, and promise to start paying the bills again (and hopefully get Google to spend more on Twitter ads and maybe a licensing deal on the newly expensive API).

Either way, apparently Google and Amazon aren’t the only cloud providers Elon stiffed: the latest news is that they’re not paying their Oracle cloud bill.

Representatives for Oracle have started directly calling current and former Twitter employees in an attempt to collect on past-due invoices well into the six-figure range, the people said. Oracle has for several years provided Twitter with data-storage services, one of the people added.

Now, this one is particularly funny, given that Oracle founder (and chairman and CTO) Larry Ellison is a close friend of Musk’s and, somewhat famously, invested in Elon’s Twitter buyout. As you may recall, Ellison and Elon texted each other, with Larry basically promising to dump however much money into the Twitter buyout as Elon wanted, casually tossing off the idea of putting in $1 or $2 billion.

From the mockup we created after these actual texts were revealed in the Twitter purchase lawsuit:

In the end, it turned out that Ellison put in $1 billion (which is now valued at significantly less than that by basically everyone). I remember at the time, there was some talk of how this would be a business win for Oracle, who has desperately been trying to build up its cloud computing business which has definitely lagged the bigger name cloud computing companies (and even when it wins deals, like TikTok, those come from political connections rather than through standard business practices).

But instead of being a boon to Ellison’s Oracle, Musk has now set much of his billion dollars on fire, and is refusing to pay Oracle’s bills. It really raises serious questions about who would ever trust this guy in any future business deal ever. And will Yaccarino now have to have a call with Larry to “smooth things over” like she did with Kurian (notably: a former top Oracle exec) at Google?