Tech billionaire Elon Musk worked frantically behind the scenes to stop one of President Donald Trump's deals in the Middle East involving a rival artificial intelligence company, The New York Times reported on Wednesday evening.
"Ahead of Mr. Trump’s trip to the Middle East this month, Mr. Musk objected to a deal in the works between a rival A.I. company and the United Arab Emirates to build a massive data center in Abu Dhabi, according to a White House official," reported Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swan, and Ryan Mac. Musk, per the report, "complained to David Sacks, the president’s A.I. adviser, and other White House officials about the Abu Dhabi project involving OpenAI, an organization he founded with Sam Altman, with whom he has since had a falling out, according to the official."
The billionaire additionally "expressed concerns about fairness more broadly for other A.I. companies, and sought to have his own company, xAI, be included in the deal, though it ultimately was not."
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xAI is the company behind Grok, which runs a chatbot on Musk's X platform and has often been manipulated into contradicting Musk on a variety of issues. It also mysteriously began ranting about "white genocide" and South African white supremacist conspiracy theories in response to every topic in an incident earlier this month.
The Times report also noted that Musk, while he remains in good standing in the White House, has drifted apart from the president amid political outrage put on him by the public.
"The billionaire’s imprint is still firmly felt in official Washington through that effort, an initiative to drastically cut spending that has deployed staff across the government," said the report. "But Mr. Musk has said in recent days that he spent too much time focused on politics and has lamented the reputational damage he and his companies have suffered because of his work in the Trump administration."
Musk also went out of his way to attack Trump's "big, beautiful bill" on tax cuts currently set to be debated in the Senate, complaining that it increases rather than reduces the federal deficit.