President Donald Trump hosted an event Tuesday with wealthy tech CEOs to tout what he portrayed as one of the biggest accomplishments of his presidency thus far: a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure. But it didn’t take long for his biggest benefactor, Elon Musk, to throw dirt all over it.
Trump’s press event with Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Masayoshi Son of Softbank was to announce what Trump said could be “something that could be the biggest of all” (specifically, data centers to power A.I. tools). Trump held a similar press conference with Son in 2016 to announce large investments in the U.S., and the results of those investments were pretty mixed.
It’s unclear whether Trump was announcing a wholly novel investment or just providing new details on a plan that was already in place. Last March, the tech news platform The Information reported on a $100 billion, multiyear data center project involving OpenAI and Microsoft. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s event was clearly meant to deliver an early win of sorts to Trump. The CEOs repeatedly credited Trump for the multibillion-dollar deal.
But Musk wasn’t having it.
“They don’t actually have the money,” he claimed in a post on X in response to OpenAI’s announcement of the so-called Stargate Project. Musk followed that up with a claim that “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2025
Musk provided no evidence for this assertion, and given his own ambitions of developing AI tools and ongoing legal feud with OpenAI, there’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical. A source familiar with the project also told CNBC that “there’s no doubt” that Musk’s grudge against Altman inspired the posts. (Neither OpenAI nor Oracle immediately responded to CNBC requests for comment, and Softbank declined to comment.)
Altman, for his part, later responded to Musk by defending the project’s merits, posting: “this is great for the country. i realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.”
The OpenAI CEO topped off his remarks with some rather effusive praise, posting, “I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time.”
Trump has yet to weigh in on Musk’s allegation, but it seems likely that having his best-known, attention-hungry supporter undercut the details behind the deal would take the shine off the announcement.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.