Five Things Tech: Ellison, Quantum, Aschenbrenner, Google, 1-Person Million Dollar Startups
This is everything you should read about Tech right now. Really.
Heya and welcome to Five Things Tech!
Strange week. At the top end, Larry Ellison is reaching for everything not nailed down — compute, the White House, Hollywood — while Leopold Aschenbrenner just demonstrated how fast one can burn through $45 billion when leverage runs the wrong way. Meanwhile a court told Google it doesn't actually own the internet it scraped, which is my favorite kind of irony this year. And at the completely other end of the spectrum, thousands of solo founders are quietly building million-dollar companies without a single employee. Oh, and quantum computing remains five years away, as it has been for fifteen years. Power is concentrating and dispersing at the same time right now, and I honestly couldn't tell you which trend wins.
Let's get into it. 🤓
Larry Ellison Bet It All on the A.I. Boom. Will He Be the Face of the A.I. Bubble?
Ellison had come around to Trump long before many other tech leaders. After the 2020 election, he joined a strategy call of Trump confidants about how to overturn the results, and in 2024, he gave tens of millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign. But OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, who was on hand at the White House too, was a Democratic donor and Trump critic. Ellison had helped arrange a call between the two men to tee up the event.
For Ellison, it was the capstone of a mad two-year scramble to transform Oracle into an A.I. juggernaut. The effort began in late 2022 when the launch of ChatGPT stunned the world and set in motion a race to master and control the most transformative new technology since the birth of the internet. Ellison, a founding father of Silicon Valley and the last of his generation still in the game, was desperate to avoid getting left behind. He’d moved quickly and aggressively — some might even say recklessly — to turn Oracle into a “hyperscaler,” one of the handful of companies providing the critical infrastructure that would power the A.I. boom.
Ellison is trying to do a huge powergrab right now, including dominating Hollywood. I sure hope he fails.
Why full-fledged quantum computers might always be five years away
Quantum computers are also much closer to being useful devices than they were just a handful of years ago. Sure, they haven’t yet changed the world by aiding the discovery of some groundbreaking drug or battery redesign, but you could access a quantum computer through the cloud right now and use it as a scientific tool if you happen to be a chemist or a material scientist.
It’s probably a lot like mobile - everyone talked about it all the time and it just wasn’t there yet. And then, boom, it was there. When will that moment be for Quantum?
How Leopold Aschenbrenner built a $45 billion AI hedge fund — and lost most of it in days
At its peak earlier this month, his fund sat atop $45 billion in assets. By Thursday, however, after being forced to offload all of his leveraged stock bets — including hard-hit names like SK Hynix and CoreWeave — to Ken Griffin’s Citadel at a discount, the fund’s holdings plunged to around $10 billion, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
The story of Aschenbrenner’s meteoric rise and sudden fall has captivated both Wall Street and tech circles, making him the most high-profile casualty yet of the volatility accompanying the AI boom.
I think Larry Ellison will be watching this closely. I don’t want to too sound too negative this week, but there sure are too many people out there who hand out cash too loosely in hope of huge rewards.
“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet,” web scraper says after court win
Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with expertise in the DMCA for a nonprofit public interest group called Public Knowledge, told Ars that Google and Reddit seem to be “sort of grasping at whatever tool is available” in the face of the sudden, continuous rise of AI scraping over the past three years. And while the way they’re using the DMCA is “bizarre”—and “not what the law had sort of contemplated as a use case”—she says it’s not “surprising.” Historically, the DMCA has been an effective tool to quickly stop disfavored content uses and force discussions around licensing, so turning to it may have been an obvious starting point, given Google’s goals.
But Google’s and Reddit’s unusual DMCA arguments don’t seem to be winning ones. Last week, a court took the somewhat rare step of granting SerpApi’s motion to dismiss very early on in Google’s lawsuit. In that case, the judge found that Google had no DMCA standing to sue SerpApi, since it didn’t own any of the content in the search results and has not shown that it’s acting on behalf of any rights holders.
This really is a very interesting case and I assume Google will fight back with everything they have to protect the content they scraped off the interwebs. How ironic.
The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies With Just One Employee
Once upon a time, running a business of a certain size required a team. AI is turning that assumption upside down, and more aspiring entrepreneurs are going it alone.
Tech has seen an explosion of solo founders in the past year. Broca said he likes being able to work at his own speed, unencumbered by a team. Jonah Reenders for WSJ
An analysis by the payments company Stripe shows there are thousands of solo operators on the company’s platform that are generating over $1 million in revenue, with their ranks doubling between 2023 and 2025. The number of solo operators crossing the $10 million threshold nearly tripled in that same span.
It’s amazing how much AI is changing the way we work and it allows small companies to do stuff that used to be only possible for larger companies. This is a huge shift.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading! If you missed last week’s Five Things Tech, you can find it here:
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— Nico