Trump and SoftBank Promise to Create 100,000 AI Jobs. It Won’t Be Easy.
2 min
SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son stood besides President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, and announced a commitment to invest $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years—and create 100,000 jobs. The investments will be concentrated in AI.
“My confidence level to the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory,” Son said at the news conference.
SoftBank is an investment holding company with a range of technology investments all over the world, but especially in the U.S. At the end of September, the total value of its investments was $136 billion, so the new commitment would represent a substantial expansion of SoftBank’s balance sheet.
Raising that sort of money may prove difficult, but the bigger obstacle could be the commitment on jobs—the focus on AI companies, in particular, complicates the goal. AI companies spend a lot on salaries, but these are some of the most expensive employees in the world right now. And they don’t tend to employ a lot of people overall
OpenAI, which has raised $18 billion and has a private market value of $157 billion, has 1,372 employees. To fulfill Trump and Son’s commitment, in other words, the investments would have to create 73 AI companies on the scale of OpenAI.
“A lot of advanced tech these days, including AI, is capital intensive and also highly dependent on high-paid skilled workers,” labor economist Guy Berger of the Burning Glass Institute told Barron’s . “I’m not sure how much head count $100 billion spread out over four years gets you.”
A selection of a dozen AI start-ups with valuations over a billion dollars reveals the uphill climb to the 100,000 jobs goal. These companies have raised a combined $42 billion and have an aggregate private market value of $309 billion, according to FactSet. Anthropic, which has raised almost $12 billion, has only 425 employees. All told, these companies employ less than 10,000 workers, an average of 785 workers per start-up.
Databricks, a data analytics start-up with a valuation of $43 billion, accounts for almost half of those employees. Excluding Databricks, the per start-up employee count falls to 399.
Other barriers in the labor market exist, as well. The overall unemployment rate is 4.2%, but narrow that down to workers with masters and doctoral degrees who are most likely to be AI employees, and the rate drops to 2.0% and 1.0%, respectively. In all, there are only 483,000 workers with advanced degrees looking for work, and most of them aren’t AI engineers.
“The labor market is not super loose right now,” Berger said. “A lot of gross jobs created here might simply involve reallocating people who already have jobs.”
Monday’s press conference recalled a similar one from 2016, when Trump and Son stood in the lobby of Trump Tower and promised $50 billion in U.S. investment and 50,000 jobs. SoftBank didn’t reply to a request for comment about the progress of that 2016 commitment.
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The Federal Budget may have softened some of its proposed tax reforms, but it has exposed a bigger issue: too many families are relying on wealth structures that no longer reflect the realities of modern life.
3 min
For many Australians, the 2026 Federal Budget initially felt like a direct challenge to the way wealth is created, held and transferred between generations.
The headlines were immediate: changes to capital gains tax, reforms to discretionary trusts, restrictions on negative gearing and increased scrutiny of investment structures. Unsurprisingly, affluent families, business owners and investors began asking the same question:
Is the way we hold our wealth still fit for purpose?
In recent days, the government has announced several significant amendments following industry consultation and public feedback, including exempting testamentary trusts from the proposed 30 per cent minimum tax and expanding capital gains tax concessions for small businesses.
The backdown is welcome. But it also highlights something much bigger.
This Budget has accelerated a conversation that many Australian families have been postponing for years.
The conversation is not really about tax. It is about wealth stewardship.
For decades, Australians have built wealth through businesses, property, investments and careful long-term planning. Yet many families have not revisited the legal structures surrounding those assets in years, sometimes decades.
We often see clients who have spent years building significant wealth, only to discover their legal arrangements no longer reflect their current circumstances.
Their children are now adults. They may own multiple properties.
They may have sold a business, entered a second marriage, become grandparents or accumulated digital assets that did not exist when their original estate plans were prepared.
The trust that distributes income may need to be reconsidered. The bucket company may no longer be so attractive.
The Budget has simply exposed a reality that already existed: wealth structures cannot remain static while life continues to evolve.
Importantly, trusts themselves are not the issue.
Trusts are legitimate planning tools that provide flexibility, protection and continuity. When used appropriately, they allow families to adapt to changing circumstances over time.
And neither is tax the issue, really. Getting the fundamentals right is more important for long-term, sustainable wealth than a few favourable tax treatments around the edges.
The real issue is complacency.
Too often, families create structures and assume the job is done. It isn’t.
Estate planning is no longer a document you sign once and file away in a drawer. It is an ongoing process that should evolve alongside your life.
We are also seeing a broader shift in how Australians define wealth itself. It is no longer just the family home and an investment portfolio.
Modern wealth includes businesses, digital assets, cryptocurrency, intellectual property, frequent flyer points and increasingly complex family arrangements.
At the same time, Australians are living longer than ever before, meaning wealth may need to support multiple generations simultaneously. This creates new responsibilities and new risks.
How do you help your children enter the property market without exposing family wealth to relationship breakdowns?
How do you structure wealth so that it remains a source of opportunity rather than future conflict?
These are the questions families should be asking now.
The recent debate surrounding testamentary trusts also serves as an important reminder that policy decisions can have unintended consequences for vulnerable Australians. It is encouraging that the government has listened to feedback and clarified its position.
But the lesson remains: the wealth landscape is changing.
Increasingly, governments, regulators and tax authorities are paying closer attention to how wealth is held and transferred. That means families cannot afford to adopt a “set-and-forget” approach to their structures.
The families who will be best placed for the future are not necessarily those with the greatest wealth.
They are the families with the greatest clarity. Clarity around ownership, succession and governance. And clarity around how wealth will transition from one generation to the next.
Ultimately, preserving wealth is not about avoiding change.
It is about preparing for it.
Because the greatest risk is not change itself.
It is losing the ability to respond to it.
Anthony Hunt is Co-Founder of Wealth Lawyers and former COO of Westpac Private Bank. He advises business owners, investors and affluent Australian families on wealth protection, succession planning and intergenerational wealth transfer
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