Musk throws cold water on Trump’s big infrastructure announcement: ‘they don’t actually have the money’

Boasts of a 12-figure investment in the United States were met with a douse of cold water from the world’s richest man “on good authority.”

Meant to be another first-week win chalked up by President Donald Trump, a press conference and announcement about The Stargate Project and intended artificial intelligence investments came with a personalized community note from Elon Musk.

After touting the shared target of $500 billion in investments alongside CEOs Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Larry Ellison of Oracle, the SpaceX CEO contended that the Japan-based multinational investment holding in particular only had a fraction of the funds they were committing.

“They don’t actually have the money,” wrote Musk on X in response to the announcement. “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”

According to OpenAI, their funding along with SoftBank, Oracle and MGX would facilitate technology partners including Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and OpenAI in advancing the AI infrastructure in the United States under Trump.

“This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world,” read the announcement in part. “This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”

During the press conference, the president had bragged, “In total, before the end of my first full business day in Washington and the White House, we’ve already secured nearly $3 trillion of new investments in the United States. And probably, that’s going to be six or seven by the end of the week.”

“It’s big money and high-quality people,” he added as Altman contended, “This will be the most important project of this era,” and Son suggested, “This is the beginning of golden age.”

Early in 2024, Musk had notably filed suit against the Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Altman alleging there had been a breach of contract by the company he had helped found in 2015 as a result of commercial ties with Microsoft and failure to release technology and knowledge to the public, departing “from its original mission and historical practice.”

In 2023, Musk had founded a new artificial intelligence company, xAI.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press appeared to downplay the announcement, reporting, “The initial plans for Stargate go back to the Biden administration,” citing a letter from OpenAI to the previous administration’s Commerce Department that said permitting and planning for projects like Stargate “can be lengthy and complex, particularly for energy infrastructure.”

Still, each of CEOs had credited Trump for making the project possible, as did Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) who commented “Everything is bigger in Texas” as the Lone Star State would be the first location for a data center.

Kevin Haggerty

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