President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to office soon — and the grandiose promises from CEOs seem poised to return, too.
In a Monday briefing with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Trump announced the company’s commitment $100 billion investment in US projects In his second term, promising to create 100,000 new jobs. According to Trump, Japanese technology and telecom company Softbank’s new investment will focus on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
If that pledge sounds familiar, that’s because Son made a similar promise after Trump’s first presidential win in 2016, when Son made a 50 billion dollar investment and its creation 50,000 new jobs. But while SoftBank appears to have followed through on its investment promise, It is “obscure” that work follows — a reminder that splashy announcements like Son’s latest shouldn’t be taken as iron-clad guarantees.
As CNN’s Alison Morrow and David Goldman found out SoftBank invested about $75 billion In US companies after the first pledge, it “never made clear how many jobs it actually created – and how many were actually a work result. new investment,” they write.
Vox reached out to SoftBank for clarification on its previous investments and how many jobs they created but did not receive a response prior to publication.
Other corporate investments that Trump touted during his first term also had underwhelming returns. In the case of Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer, for example, The company has promised a $10 billion Wisconsin plant and 13,000 jobsAnd both counts fall short. An updated version of the contract eventually saw Foxconn lower that number About 1,500 jobs.
According to a 2019 ProPublica investigationalong with several other corporations alibaba And Broadcom has also been cited by the Trump administration as a source of new jobs, though many of those gains never materialized.
However, such promises are still valuable to a president who once promised to run the country like a business, regardless of their recent success. They provide a good headline for Trump and an opportunity to burnish his self-created image as a “dealmaker.”
Now that Trump is returning to power, business leaders are once again looking for ways to build influence with the administration, often with the goal of forging favorable regulatory outcomes or government deals. SoftBank’s announcement suggests that prominent job commitments, which the company may not be able to deliver on, will continue to be one of those avenues.
How SoftBank’s last promise panned out
Softbank, which was earlier The telecom giant owns a large stake in SprintKnown for investing in technology companies through his venture capital fund, Vision Fund, which is backed in part by The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The fund has poured billions into US tech behemoths including Uber, WeWork and Slack During the first Trump administration.
As The New York Times reported in 2019, however, many of these Investments were already working before Trump’s electionAnd not the result of the promise of the son. And in December 2019, Forbes journalists Biz Carson and Angel Au-Young published an investigation into whether those investments Son’s ad created jobsAnd unable to find evidence of job creation on the promised scale.
“SoftBank would not provide an estimate of how many jobs it has created in the U.S. since Son’s pledge,” they wrote. “Since most of the Vision Fund’s investments have gone to private companies, public data is not available, making it difficult to hold Son accountable for his commitments.” Carson and Au-Yeung contacted 50 SoftBank-backed companies to inquire about the new jobs they added, with many declining to comment, others reporting only modest gains.
A 2019 ProPublica report reached the same conclusion, noting SoftBank’s investment resulted in approximately 10,200 new or saved jobs At the time, that meant Trump wasn’t on pace to create 50,000 jobs by the end of his term.
Publicly available information about some of the companies SoftBank has invested in also suggests it may have trouble reaching the job creation benchmarks it has set. Some larger organizations support it, eg Uber And WeWorkFor example, oversight of widespread layoffs affecting thousands of employees in 2019 and 2020. And several of the other startups that SoftBank funded were much smaller, so the potential to create new jobs on a large scale was unlikely.
During Trump’s first term, SoftBank’s investment and job announcements came as the administration prepared to oversee a potential T-Mobile merger with Sprint, which Department of Justice And Federal Communications Commission Finally approved. This year, it comes as Trump weighs tariffs on goods Several business partners from the United States, including Japan, where SoftBank is headquartered.
Examples of SoftBank, as well as many CEOs – incl Apple’s Tim Cook And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — recently traveled to meet with Trump, suggesting the president-elect’s grip on big business is as strong as ever. But while announcements about new factories, billion-dollar investments, and spectacular job creation may sound impressive, the results of Trump’s first term suggest that reality likely won’t match the promises made.
