Oracle has had a wild year. The stock ended 2024 at $166.64 and ended the shortened Christmas Eve session at $197.49. In between, the stock bottomed at $118.86 and peaked at $345.72, for a spread of 191%. As we close the year out, shares have rallied 11% in five days. Oracle's highlight reel includes cloud computing, social media, and Hollywood studios.

Oracle's move toward subscription-based cloud revenue has given the company a more reliable revenue stream, and provides customers with more cost predictability and fewer internal IT expenses. It's spending much of that revenue -- and more -- to finance its big cloud ambitions.

From 2011 to 2020, Oracle sales grew at an average rate of less than 1% but carried an average gross margin of 75%. The company had more cash than debt and an average free-cash-flow margin of 34%. It generated $118 billion in free cash flow in that decadelong period and reduced the diluted share count by 41% through share buybacks.

Growth jumped to 14% in the last quarter, a number that will likely continue rising. But it comes at a cost. Gross margin has dipped to 64%, and Oracle burned through $10 billion in cash in the quarter. Cash holdings are falling and debt is rising, augmented by an $18 billion bond sale in September. The share count is increasing again.

Crucial to Oracle stock's 2025 was a $300 billion cloud contract with OpenAI, a start-up that doesn't have $300 billion or a clear business path to getting it.

While Oracle stock initially soared on the deal, it went into an extended slump as investors evaluated the counterparty risk that OpenAI posed, along with Oracle's own costs of fulfilling the contract should it go through.

Amid the rapid change at Oracle, Chairman Larry Ellison is getting his fingers into media. Oracle was already the cloud provider for U.S. data from TikTok, the video-sharing platform owned by the Chinese company Bytedance. Through a deal negotiated this year and due to close in January, Oracle will become a 15% owner of a new U.S. TikTok entity.

While it is a relatively small stake, Oracle will be responsible for retraining the TikTok recommendation engine on U.S. data only.

Meanwhile, Ellison and his son, David, are trying to build a Hollywood media empire. In 2006 David Ellison founded Skydance, a film-production company conceived to prop up his fledgling acting career with the movie Flyboys, which starred Ellison and James Franco. It was a flop, but since 2010, Skydance has managed to become an important film producer, churning out hits like five Mission: Impossible movies among many others.

David Ellison was able to leverage a $6 billion investment from his father into a purchase of Paramount and its fabled-but-troubled Hollywood studio. That deal closed in August at a total enterprise value of $28 billion.

Off that victory, the Ellisons set their sights on Warner Bros. Discovery before losing out to Netflix. Paramount Skydance, backed by the Ellisons, have gone directly to shareholders with an all-cash offer of $30 a share.

In choosing Netflix over Paramount, Warner Bros. noted, in part, that the Paramount deal was backed by the Ellison Family Trust, where Larry Ellison's 1.2 billion shares of Oracle reside, valued around $230 billion. But it is a revocable trust, which means that the Ellisons can pull the shares out any time they like, and that made Warner management nervous.

Larry Ellison has since personally guaranteed $40 billion of the cash deal. Another $30 billion would be provided by private-equity company Redbird, which was also part of the Paramount deal, as well as two Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds.

Warner comes with the movie and TV studios, film distribution, the largest Hollywood content library, HBO, DC Comics, and a big set of declining cable channels that were originally part of Discovery and Turner Communications, a 1996 acquisition that included CNN.

If Larry Ellison sells $40 billion of Oracle to pay for Warner, he would be trading shares that fetch 26 times every dollar in company profit for a company with negative earnings, and no P/E at all. Strictly looking at the finances, the Ellisons are trading down.

Paramount's CBS News and Warner Bros.' CNN are legacy new outlets that get poor ratings from unfavorable demographics. CBS Evening News averaged around 4.2 million viewers in November -- in last place among the broadcast networks' nightly news program -- with only about a half million in the crucial 25-to-54 age demographic.

CNN prime time shows averaged 556,000 viewers and only about 100,000 in the prized demo. The salience of both news organizations is waning.

But TikTok has greater reach, and its recommendation engine, under Larry Ellison's control if the TikTok deal is completed, can influence younger people's political opinions. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 37% of U.S. adults use TikTok, but that rises to 63% for adults under 30.

Oracle opened the year going all in on the cloud. Now, its shareholders will have to get comfortable with a 2026 focused on film and media. For tech investors, it's uncomfortable -- and largely -- unwelcome territory.