Opinion When does imaginary money come before real? If you had bought Oracle shares on Tuesday last week and sold them on Friday, you might have some real cash. But everything else lives in a gray area.

It was quite a week for Big Red. After distinctly pedestrian results in terms of the usual metrics — profits were flat at $2.93 billion for the first quarter of 2026 while revenue also missed analysts' expectation – Oracle's share price increased by 40 percent overnight . Optimism was fuelled by its predictions of what customers will spend on cloud infrastructure in the next four years, propelled by an expected surge in demand for AI.

The result was that, in theory, Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder and CTO, overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man . On paper, at least, when

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