Elon Musk has taken another swing at SoftBank, this time claiming that the Japanese conglomerate is defaulting on its turbine orders. The comment came as a reply to a post from markets account unusual_whales, which reported that an anonymous seller was trying to offload about $500 million worth of data center loans all at once — just days after the US midterm elections raised fresh doubts about several AI infrastructure projects.
According to the post, the seller is auctioning off a dozen loans, including a $25 million slice of financing tied to a massive Stargate data center site in New Mexico, the joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. Oracle has reportedly already sent the site’s developer a force majeure notice — a legal move that can excuse a company from its obligations when circumstances beyond its control get in the way. Musk’s reply to the thread was blunt: “SoftBank is defaulting on their turbine orders.”
Musk hasn’t offered any evidence for the claim so far, and SoftBank hasn’t responded publicly. But the comment lands at a moment when the financing behind Stargate’s New Mexico campus is already under scrutiny, with loans tied to the project reportedly being shopped around at a discount.
Musk’s History Of Doubting SoftBank’s Numbers
This isn’t the first time Musk has questioned whether SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son can actually back up the sums he promises. When OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle first announced the $500 billion Stargate Project in January 2025, Musk shot back on X that the companies involved didn’t really have the money, and claimed SoftBank had secured well under $10 billion of it — a claim Sam Altman publicly disputed, inviting Musk to visit the first site under construction.
Months later, when Son was reported to be planning a trillion-dollar robotics and chip manufacturing complex in Arizona alongside TSMC, Musk dismissed the number outright, saying Son’s “bullshit” had reached “epic proportions.” The two have also clashed more recently over a very different kind of infrastructure bet: Musk has been pushing orbital data centers as the future of AI compute, an idea Son openly dismissed at a SoftBank shareholder meeting, arguing that launch costs and maintenance logistics outweigh any savings from solar power in space, and that SoftBank would rather keep building on the ground.
It’s worth noting that Musk and SoftBank aren’t exactly neutral observers of each other. Musk runs xAI and has been racing to build out his own AI data center capacity, while SoftBank has poured tens of billions into OpenAI and the Stargate buildout — so Musk arguably has something to gain from casting doubt on a rival’s infrastructure spending.
The Bigger Picture: A Rough Week For AI Infrastructure Bets
The loan auction and Musk’s comments arrive right in the middle of a brutal stretch for AI-linked stocks. Tech and AI shares were hammered on Wall Street this week, with the Nasdaq Composite falling more than 5% in a single session, wiping out a brief post-midterm relief rally. SoftBank’s own stock was among the hardest hit, falling over 12% intraday, while chip and data center names like Nebius, Micron, AMD and CoreWeave each dropped double digits. Softbank itself has dropped 44% this month.
Part of the selloff has been pinned on political risk to AI data centers after Democrats swept both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterms, with data center buildouts having become a flashpoint in several state and local races. The other part is a broader reckoning over whether hundreds of billions of dollars committed to AI infrastructure will actually generate returns — a question that’s now showing up in everything from corporate layoffs to, apparently, lenders quietly trying to get out of data center loans before things get worse.
Whether or not SoftBank is actually behind on its turbine orders, the fact that financing tied to one of Stargate’s flagship sites is being shopped around at a discount — paired with Oracle’s own force majeure notice — suggests the cracks Musk has been pointing to since Stargate’s launch haven’t entirely gone away.