India, April 3 -- Thirty thousand jobs have just been cut from Oracle's rolls. Of those, 12,000 were in India. Engineers, analysts, and back-office stalwarts were confronted with a stark reality: they were merely dispensable line items on a balance sheet that needed to be cleaned up. Politely labelled as "unfortunate layoffs at a time of AI transition," this is, in fact, the unfolding narrative of a company in the midst of a reckoning. To understand why 12,000 families in Bengaluru and Hyderabad are staring at blank screens today, the gaze must shift past the software. It must instead look towards the company's billionaire promoter, Larry Ellison.

"I think Larry got distracted," the founder-chairman of one of India's most prominent tech ...