Sam Altman gets combative with Elon Musk on Twitter

January 22, 2025 at 06:18PM
There is some head-scratching about yesterday’s $500 billion investment in data centers that was touted at the White House. The big question is: whose money is it?

The announcement was led by Softbank’s Masayoshi Son and that firm only has $134 billion under management. He was flanked by Oracle, which has a market cap of $517 billion and would need to put up a considerable amount and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, another firm that doesn’t have those financial resources.

Now, obviously these projects would be debt financed but that would still require a massive amount of capital and it’s totally unclear where that would come from.

Elon Musk fanned the flames saying “they don’t actually have the money”. He continued: “SoftBank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority”.

Given his position, I’d suspect he has it on good authority indeed.

Microsoft added some fuel to the flames earlier as well, when CEO Satya Nadella he was asked about the huge investment.

“All I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion,”he said.

But Sam Altman just hit back replying to Musk about the secured money well-under $10 billion, writing:

Wrong, as you surely know.
want to come visit the first site already under way?
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.

Musk has yet to respond.

It matters because there have been some big moves in markets today based on these numbers and it’s unclear what’s fact and what’s aspiration. Oracle is up 7% and Nvidia is up 4%.

This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.