As Trump crows about billion-dollar A.I. deal, Musk undercuts announcement

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.