Comment by shadowgovt

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.