Elon Musk Stargate: Tesla CEO bashes Trump's AI project undermining President and clashes with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman - what did he say?
Elon Musk has flipped out over Donald Trump’s AI Stargate project as he clashed with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The new entity, Stargate, will start building projects needed for the further development of the fast-evolving AI in Texas, according to the White House. Donald Trump announced the project on Tuesday (21 January), and it will be a new partnership formed by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank.
Trump declared it “a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential” under his new administration, with an initial private investment of $100 billion that could reach five times that sum. But Musk, a close Trump adviser, questioned the value of the investment hours later.
He wrote on X: “They don’t actually have the money. SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
Altman responded on Wednesday (22 January) to say Musk was “wrong, as you surely know” and invited the Tesla CEO to come visit the first site in Texas that is already under construction. Musk went further. He retweeted an image of a crack pipe with the accompanying tweet: “Leaked image of the research tool OpenAI used to come up with their $500 billion number for Stargate.” He spent much of Wednesday afternoon sniping at Stargate.
The public clash over Stargate is part of a years-long dispute between Musk and Altman that began with a boardroom rivalry over who should run OpenAI, which both men helped found. Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the artificial intelligence company last year alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits.
Musk has since escalated the dispute, adding new claims and asking for a court order that would stop OpenAI’s plans to convert itself into a for-profit business more fully. A hearing is set for February in a California federal court.
He started his own rival AI company, xAI, last year, that is building its own big data center in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk says it faces unfair competition from OpenAI and its close business partner Microsoft, which has supplied the huge computing resources needed to build AI systems such as ChatGPT.