Software giant Oracle on Tuesday started laying off workers as it looks to rein in costs and double down on artificial intelligence.

On LinkedIn, Oracle employees, including software engineers, account executives and program managers, shared publicly that they were affected by a mass layoff at the company and were looking for new jobs.

Oracle was founded in California, but moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in 2020.

The company, which sells software and other services to help businesses manage and store data, hasn’t said publicly how many jobs were cut. CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Oracle was slashing thousands of workers. As of May 2025, Oracle had 162,000 workers.

Oracle has offices throughout the world, including in California in Irvine, Santa Monica, Redwood City and Santa Clara. It’s unclear if the mass layoff also affected workers in California. Oracle declined to comment.

The company is the latest tech firm to shed workers as it focuses more heavily on AI. Meta, Block, Amazon, Salesforce and other tech giants have continued to lay off their workers even as they hire for other roles and spend billions of dollars on AI data centers and products.

U.S.-based tech employers announced more than 33,000 job cuts from January to February, up 51% compared with the same period last year, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in March.

Business Insider reported earlier on the Oracle cuts, citing an email the company sent to employees early Tuesday.

“After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change. As a result, today is your last working day,” the email stated.

As part of their pivot to artificial intelligence, Oracle, OpenAI and Softbank announced last year that they would invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years in a project called Stargate. Companies rely on a massive trove of data to train and maintain AI systems, increasing the demand for data centers that house computing equipment. Oracle has also teamed up with with AI chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable tech company.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has been playing a bigger role in Hollywood too.

He backed his son David’s Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, personally guaranteeing $40.4 billion to support the offer. Competing against streaming giant Netflix, Paramount Skydance prevailed in the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, striking a deal valued at more than $111 billion.

Oracle is the cloud provider for TikTok, a short-form video app that faced threats of a ban in the United States because it’s owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok then struck a deal to create a new U.S. entity to avoid a ban. Oracle’s stake in TikTok’s U.S. operation, which includes other managing investors such as Silver Lake and MGX, is roughly $2 billion, according to a March filing from Oracle.

Oracle’s stock price jumped more than 5% on Tuesday to $146.92 per share following reports of the company’s job cuts.

Since January, Oracle’s shares have dropped more than 24%. Oracle has benefited from the AI boom but investors have been wary about how much the company is spending. Oracle also competes against Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft and others for business customers.

In February, Oracle said it would raise up to $50 billion through debt and equity to expand its cloud infrastructure business, which includes customers such as AMD, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI.

How worried are America’s wealthy about the possibility they’ll be hit with a higher tax for Social Security?

Plenty, judging from the endless creativity of their proposals to improve the program’s fiscal condition by cutting benefits rather than raising revenue (typically from our most affluent taxpayers).

The latest run at this fence comes from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which as I’ve explained before is an offspring of the late billionaire hedge fund operator Peter G. Peterson, who was an obdurate foe of Social Security. The committee dubs its proposal the “Six Figure Limit,” which is accurate enough: It would cap annual Social Security benefits at $50,000 per person, or $100,000 per couple.

Make no mistake: This is a benefit cut. It’s part and parcel of the enduring Republican and conservative project to protect their rich patrons from paying taxes to cover their fair share of the costs of social programs.

As recently as a White House event Wednesday, President Trump revived the old “guns or butter” debate—it was Lyndon Johnson who said during the Vietnam War that the country could afford both, but Trump stated that as long as “we’re fighting wars…it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”

Trump said those programs should be taken up by the states, which would have to raise their own taxes, allowing the federal government to “lower our taxes.”

The committee claims its proposal would affect only the richest, but that’s true only as a snapshot of current conditions. About 1.2 million of the 53.6 million retirees receiving benefits today, or about 2.3%, receive enough from Social Security to breach the $50,000 annual cap.

Typically they’re retirees who earned the maximum taxable wage income — $184,500 this year — almost every year of their work careers, and also opted to defer receiving their benefits until age 70 to receive a higher monthly stipend. Thanks mostly to inflation, however, the cap will creep into the middle class as sure as water seeks its own level; that may take years, but by the time today’s youngest workers retire, it would be entrenched in the system.

The proposal reflects one of Pete Peterson’s hobby horses, which was the idea that scads of money could be saved by means-testing Social Security so billionaires like himself don’t get handouts they don’t need.

The Six Figure Limit reads like a stepchild of that notion, but as I’ve reported before, the problem with it is that means-testing Social Security wouldn’t save the program much money unless you started cutting means-tested benefits at incomes as small as $50,000.

The CRFB’s proposal, as embodied in an explanatory manifesto posted on its website, doesn’t explain why $100,000 should be the cutoff, other than that maybe it’s a nice round number.

“This is a program that, when you go back to its founding, was a measure of protection against falling into poverty,” Marc Goldwein, the committee’s senior policy director, told CBS News. “The fact that an income support program would pay six figures is a little silly.”

I asked the committee what’s “silly” about a couple receiving $100,000 from Social Security after they’ve paid for it all their working lives, and given that U.S. median household income was $1,071 when Social Security was founded in 1935 and today it’s $83,730. I didn’t hear back.

The committee acknowledges that only “a small fraction of retirees” currently receive benefits of $50,000 or more today. But it frets that “$100,000 benefits will become increasingly common as Social Security’s benefit formula leads benefits to grow over time.” This isn’t quite true: It’s economic growth, more than the benefit formula, that does that, by advancing average wages.

Social Security advocates and experts have responded to the proposal with disdain. Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, labels it a “Trojan horse.”

That’s because of its proposed structure. The committee presents three possible models: Two would fix the cutoff at $50,000 per person for 20 or 30 years. The third would allow it to increase in accordance with the chained consumer price index, a little-used inflation metric that rises more slowly than the commonly used urban CPI.

Either way, Altman observes, “the $100,000 amount will continue to erode to the point that it is a subsistence level benefit unrelated to prior earnings, just as conservatives have been advocating since 1936.”

The CRFB manifesto is a scary document. It asserts that the cap would be a boon for economic growth by reducing federal borrowing and prompting retirees to rely more on resources such as personal savings and investment returns.

This happens, it says, according to “a large body of research” finding that “workers — especially high-income workers — increase their private retirement savings in response to reductions in expected public pension benefits.” In other words, if you’re afraid your Social Security is going to be cut, you put more in your IRA.

That makes sense, but only superficially. First, what about everyone other than “high-income workers”? Many middle- and working class households already struggle to meet common everyday expenses, let alone saving for college and retirement. Where will they find the money they’ll need once Social Security is gutted?

Second, who says workers invariably save more when they’re afraid of Social Security cuts? The committee footnotes this assertion to a Congressional Budget Office meta-analysis of 30 studies, conducted in 1998. What did the CBO learn? It was that no one knows.

Some studies, the CBO said, found that each dollar of expected Social Security reduces personal savings, but the range of reduction was “between zero and 50 cents.” In other words, the phenomenon may or may not be real. And if not, this pillar of the Six Figure Limit crumbles to dust. People will be thrown back on personal resources that don’t exist.

The CRFB manifesto contains other specious arguments. For example, it argues that America’s Social Security benefits are unduly generous in global terms. It validates this conclusion by comparing the maximum benefit in the U.S. in 2024 ($93,452 for a couple) to those of such other advanced economies as France ($69,403 in purchasing parity with the U.S.), Canada ($43,608) and the Netherlands ($41,765).

Yet the comparisons are suspect. National pension systems are highly diverse. France’s social security program, for example, is a mandatory supplement to private pensions, unlike in the U.S. In some countries, old-age benefits are part of broad social programs that include universal government-paid healthcare as well as government child care and other social services that don’t exist in the U.S. I asked the CRFB to respond to these issues, but received no reply.

It’s important to keep in mind that proposals like this have one fundamental goal: sparing the wealthy from an increase in their Social Security payroll tax, which is the only way to ensure the program’s fiscal feet stand on dry ground other than cutting benefits.

This year, the tax of 12.4% is levied on wage income up to $184,500, with half paid out of worker paychecks and half directly by employers. That means workers will pay a maximum $11,439, with employers paying the same.

On wages higher than the income tax cap, the rate drops to zero. For someone with income of, say, $500,000, the effective rate for each side falls from 6.2% to about 4.3%; for those with $1-million incomes, it falls to 2.28% on each side. Since the tax is on wage income alone, wealthier taxpayers get an additional break — half of the income or more for the richest Americans is in the form of investment income, which isn’t taxed at all for Social Security.

Making such so-called unearned income part of their tax base and eliminating the tax cap would improve Social Security’s fiscal balance far more than the Six Figure Limit, but that would significantly increase the Social Security tax liability of millionaires and near-millionaires. That may explain why their cat’s paws in Congress and at conservative think tanks expend so much energy finding alternatives to a tax hike.

It’s tempting to relegate this latest idea to the pile of transparent maneuvers to avert a higher Social Security tax, but the danger is that policymakers and pundits will parrot the argument that $100,000 is just too much for a retirement pension. The Washington Post editorial board started the process on March 24 with an unsigned editorial headlined, “Nobody needs over $100,000 per year in Social Security benefits.”

The piece balanced the putative generosity of Social Security against the federal government’s $39-trillion debt and a federal deficit “larger than during the Great Depression,” as though those are the consequences of providing for 53 million retirees, disabled persons and their dependents, rather than enormous tax cuts provided for the wealthy. The Post’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest men on Earth.

Anyway, the Post’s screed elicited a well-deserved beat-down from Max Richtman, president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, who crisply informed the board that its editorial was “based on the fallacy that Social Security is a welfare program. It is, in fact, social insurance.”

As he explained, “workers pay into the program and receive payments to replace income upon retirement, disability or the death of a family breadwinner. These are the ‘hazards and vicissitudes of life’ that President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to when signing Social Security into law.”

Richtman is right about Social Security, and the CRFB is wrong. For the beneficiaries who have been saved from poverty in their old age or after disability, the difference is more than rhetorical. It’s a fact of life.

When the first American crew since 1972 orbits around the moon this month, SpaceX’s stylized logo will be nowhere to be found — but it might as well be plastered everywhere.

Elon Musk’s rocket company is preparing what is expected to be the largest initial public offering in history, and it has as much, if not more, riding on NASA’s Artemis program as Boeing and the other contractors that built the SLS rocket that will blast the astronauts into space and the Orion capsule carrying them on their mission — a fly-by of our closest celestial neighbor.

Radical changes announced in February by new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman to speed up the country’s return to the moon could make the program more reliant on SpaceX on future launches.

That includes using its massive Starship rocket to ferry crews and construction materials to the moon, where Isaacman said NASA now plans to build a research and exploration station as it faces competition from a joint China-Russian team.

SpaceX, which maintains a large presence in Southern California’s burgeoning aerospace sector, is readying an initial public offering possibly for this summer that is expected to be the largest in history, perhaps raising as much as $75 billion. It follows Musk’s merging of his xAI artificial intelligence company into his rocket company in February.

The funds would help pay for Musk’s equally giant if quixotic plans: building his own Moonbase Alpha colony, manufacturing millions of driverless cars and robots, and putting artificial intelligence data centers into space, using satellites that use solar energy to do AI computations.

Here’s what to know about what this means for SpaceX, which has large operations in Hawthorne and launches its workhorse Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.

How important is it for SpaceX that NASA is returning American astronauts to the moon?

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calls the Artemis launch a “watershed” event for the company, which he expects will be a leader in the new space economy where trillions will be spent on artificial intelligence, space infrastructure and related businesses.

“The moon ultimately represents the golden goose for Musk and SpaceX,” he said. “It’s a fourth industrial revolution and we just happen to live in it.”

What plans does SpaceX have for the moon?

Musk has long said that his life’s ambition is to colonize Mars, but in February the world’s richest man posted on X that his company first planned to build “a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years.”

What would be the purpose of such a city?

A moon outpost would solve some of the same technological challenges a Mars colony would face without the same level of cost and risk, given how much faster and less expensive it is to reach the moon. Musk also has sketched out a futuristic vision of building AI data centers on the moon with the help of the company’s Optimus robots and catapulting them into space.

Catapulting data centers into space from the moon sounds like science fiction. How is that even possible?

At a February presentation, Musk said that the lower gravity of the moon would allow the satellites to be shot into space using a magnetic accelerator — what he called a “mass driver” — radically reducing the cost compared with Earth launches, in which rockets expend tons of fuel to escape gravity. “I want to just live long enough to see the mass driver on the moon, because that’s going to be incredibly epic,” he said. That timeline doesn’t even consider that SpaceX has yet to launch a data center satellite from Earth.

How does this fit into NASA’s plans?

In March, Isaacman announced the government’s own highly ambitious plans to spend $20 billion to start building a sustained human presence on the moon within seven years. While the SLS rocket would still lift the Orion capsule into Earth’s orbit, Artemis could now rely on the Starship rocket, still in its testing and development phase, to dock with the capsule in Earth’s orbit and ferry astronauts to the moon, where it would land the crew and building materials. A spacecraft being developed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin could serve as another moon lander given the vast payload needed for a moon colony. The first crewed mission to the moon’s surface is planned for 2028.

How does this tie in to SpaceX’s IPO?

SpaceX has confidentiality filed for an IPO expected later this year sources told Bloomberg on Wednesday. It could value the company at $1.75 trillion, which would allow it to sell just a fraction of its shares yet still raise more than twice as much as the current largest IPO on record: Saudi Aramco’s $29.4-billion oil-and-gas offering in 2019. Given its massive size, SpaceX is in talks with at least 21 banks to sell the securities to investors, Reuters reported.

The company has a massive need for capital if it is going to pull off Musk’s dreams, which he said rely on vast numbers of AI chips. In February, he announced the construction of a giant chip fabrication plant in Austin, Texas, because of a lack of supply from existing chipmakers.

How are financial markets reacting to Musk’s plans?

The IPO has drawn huge attention given its size and SpaceX’s prospects for growth.

“As an investor, I’m excited. As a human being, I’m excited. It’s just opening a whole different world, a universe, essentially, that we were not exposed to before. We went to the moon over 50 years ago, and that was it. Nothing has happened really since then,” said Mike Alves, founder of Pasadena’s Vida Vision Fund, which has a stake in SpaceX and xAi that accounts for 45% of his AI and robotics fund.

An analysis of the IPO by PitchBook assigns no revenue to Musk’s AI data centers or his Moonbase Alpha plan but estimates that the company earned $7.5 billion in profit last year on nearly $16 billion of revenue from its Starlink satellite network, commercial launch services for third parties and other businesses.

It estimates that growth from the company’s Starlink internet, launch and nascent satellite phone service could boost profit to $60 billion and revenue to $150 billion by 2040 — making an IPO that values the company at $1.5 trillion “expensive but not irrational.”

Are there skeptical voices about SpaceX and its IPO?

Yes, plenty. There are technological hurdles for SpaceX to carry out its plans. Most immediately, the Starship rocket that NASA is relying on — even bigger than Apollo’s Saturn V — has suffered some bad test flights. SpaceX also must master a key technological hurdle: refueling the rocket while it’s in Earth’s orbit so it has enough fuel to carry out its flight to the moon, land there and return to Earth. Beyond that, Musk’s plans to manufacture millions of chips and robots aren’t close to becoming a reality.

“There is an AI-hungry market at the moment and there’s a lot of investors waiting for those opportunities to happen,” said Igor Pejic, author of “Tech Money.” “But you face the likelihood that it might never happen, or it might happen in three years, five years, 10 years from now.”