According to the Wall Street Journal Musk worked the phones hard, calling up G42, an AI firm under the thumb of the UAE president’s brother, and warning them that their plans would be toast without his startup xAI on the guest list. He reportedly told them their project wouldn’t get President Trump’s blessing unless he was included.
Musk threw his toys out of the pram when he found out that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman would be tagging along on Trump’s mid-May Gulf tour. Musk got so irked he decided to crash the party himself, joining Trump in Saudi Arabia.
Despite Musk’s griping, US officials reviewed the deal and pushed it forward anyway. One White House insider admitted that aides discussed how to soothe Musk, as Trump and his AI and crypto sidekick David Sacks were keen to unveil the deal before heading home.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to spin it as a win, saying: “This was another great deal for the American people, thanks to President Trump and his exceptional team.” Another senior official confirmed Musk’s beef was about fairness for all AI firms.
The billionaire, who dropped $300 million into Trump’s re-election war chest and became one of the party’s top sugar daddies, recently quit his spot on the Department of Government Efficiency task force, claiming he needed to focus on his five companies, including Tesla.
Musk and Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before falling out in 2018, have been at each other’s throats for years. Musk has accused Altman of betraying OpenAI’s original nonprofit mission and has taken to calling him “Swindly Sam” and “Scam Altman.”
Meanwhile, the UAE has been lobbying hard to score AI chips and shift its economy away from just selling oil. With the Biden White House previously clamping down on who gets to buy Nvidia’s latest gear, the UAE courted the Trump camp with sweeteners, including big investments in the US and support for Trump-linked businesses.
The result was a deal dubbed Stargate UAE. It involves building a five-gigawatt cluster of AI data centres in Abu Dhabi, supposedly dwarfing anything currently running in the US. After UAE national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan visited Washington in March, the Trump team gave it the green light.
Although Tahnoon had money in multiple US AI outfits, his firm G42 fixated on OpenAI for the first major deployment and roped in Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank for the ride. As part of the arrangement, G42 will also bankroll a similar-sized project in the US.
Musk had another outburst in January over the US version of Stargate, whining after Trump and Altman unveiled the $500 billion effort without giving him a heads-up. He even slagged off the deal on his social-media site X.
Despite his outbursts, Musk has kept close ties with UAE bigwigs. Tahnoon’s MGX fund pumped cash into a \$6 billion xAI raise in December, and Dubai inked a deal with Musk’s Boring Company for an 11-mile tunnel network a couple of months later.
While xAI didn’t make the initial Stargate UAE cut, it’s still in the running for future slots at the site. Under the current US-UAE framework, xAI is shortlisted to buy a hefty chunk of the 500,000 chips up for grabs each year.