Musk and Sam Altman Battle on X over Trump’s Project Stargate

Just hours after Trump announced Stargate in tandem with the top members of OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, Elon Musk took to Twitter to question the legitimacy of the value of the investment that the investors had pledged. 

Stargate is a $500 billion AI infrastructure project that’s expected to take the physical and virtual AI infrastructure to the next level. Companies have already invested $100 billion to get the project started. 

Musk Claims the Backers Don’t “Have the Money” Required

“SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority,” said Elon Musk on X shortly after the largest-ever investment in AI was announced. This led to a thread of sarcastic Xeets (we can’t call them tweets anymore, can we?) between Elon Musk and the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman.  

In response to Musk’s comments, the CEO of OpenAI, who was present at the White House alongside Donald Trump on the day of the Stargate launch, said, “Wrong, as you surely know. Want to come visit the first site already underway?” 

The said site is a data center under construction in Abilene, Texas. “[Stargate] 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,” Altman wrote, after dismissing Musk’s tweet. 

Altman later added a sweet note saying that he genuinely admires Musk’s accomplishments and is of the opinion that he’s the most inspiring entrepreneur.

I don’t think [Musk is] a nice person or treating us fairly, but you have to respect the guy, and he pushes all of us to be more ambitious. – Sam Altman

Trump stepped in and shrugged off the comments of his prominent ally, Elon by saying the criticism was not an indictment of the deal’s viability but a clear case of bad blood with one of the members of this deal ( which evidently, is Altman). 

He further clarified to the reporters, “I don’t know if they do [have the funds], but you know, they’re putting up the money– the government’s not putting up anything, they’re putting up money. They’re very rich people, so I hope they do.”

The Actual Context Behind This Fiasco

This controversy starts to make a little more sense when we take into account that Musk’s company, xAI, is not just a competitor of Stargate but also in a lawsuit with OpenAI alleging that the latter had betrayed its founding aim as a non-profit research lab. 

Elon’s xAI is currently building its own big data center in Memphis, Tennessee, and he continues to escalate the dispute by adding claims and asking for a court order to prevent OpenAI from converting into a for-profit business. 

In the past, Musk has openly said that he feels his company faces unfair competition from OpenAI, seeing as the latter has access to a larger pool of computing resources. Consequently, xAI is also looking for infrastructure to develop its AI systems.

The Ground Reality

As for the actual truth, a source familiar with Stargate said that the assertion isn’t true, as Softbank has $24.3 billion of cash on its balance sheets per its latest earnings and is comfortable taking debt to fund the project. 

Additionally, Oracle has $11 billion in cash on its balance sheet, MGX has $100 billion in capital commitments, and OpenAI recently announced it has more than $10 billion from its recent round of venture capital funding.