President-elect Donald Trump is soon to be back in office — and grandiose commitments from CEOs sure look poised to return, too.
In a Monday briefing alongside SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Trump announced the company’s commitment to invest $100 billion in US projects during his second term, with the promise of creating 100,000 new jobs. According to Trump, the new investments by SoftBank, a Japanese tech and telecom company, will focus on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.
If that vow sounds familiar, it’s because Son offered a similar commitment after Trump’s first presidential win in 2016, when Son pledged a $50 billion investment and the creation of 50,000 new jobs. But while SoftBank does seem to have followed through on its investment promise, it’s “unclear” that the jobs followed — a reminder that splashy announcements like Son’s latest should not necessarily be taken as iron-clad guarantees.
While CNN’s Allison Morrow and David Goldman found that SoftBank did invest roughly $75 billion in US companies after its first pledge, it “never made clear how many of those jobs it actually created — and how many were actually a result of a new investment,” they write.
Vox reached out to SoftBank for clarity on its previous investments and how many jobs they generated but did not receive a response prior to publication.
Other corporate investments that Trump touted in his first term had underwhelming returns as well. In the case of Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer, for example, the company promised a $10 billion Wisconsin plant and 13,000 jobs, and fell short on both counts. An updated version of the deal eventually saw Foxconn reduce that figure to roughly 1,500 jobs.
According to a 2019 ProPublica investigation, multiple other corporations, including Alibaba and Broadcom, were also cited by the Trump administration as sources for new jobs, though many of these gains never materialized.
Such pledges, though, still have value to a president who once vowed to run the country like a business, regardless of their eventual success. They provide a good headline for Trump, and a chance to burnish his self-created image as a “dealmaker.”
Now that Trump is returning to power, business leaders are once more looking for ways to build influence with the administration, often with the goal of shaping favorable regulatory outcomes or government contracts. The SoftBank announcement suggests touting prominent job commitments, including those the company might not be able to deliver on, will continue to be one of those avenues.
How SoftBank’s last commitment panned out
SoftBank, which previously owned a large share in the telecom giant Sprint, is known for investing in tech companies via its venture capital fund, the Vision Fund, which is backed in part by the Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth funds. The fund has poured billions into US tech behemoths, including Uber, WeWork, and Slack, including during the first Trump administration.
As the New York Times reported in 2019, though, many of these investments were already in the works ahead of Trump’s election, and not the result of Son’s pledge. And in December 2019, Forbes reporters Biz Carson and Angel Au-Yeung published an investigation into whether those investments created the jobs Son advertised, and were unable to find evidence corroborating 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. “Because the majority of the Vision Fund’s investments have gone to private companies, public data is not available, making it hard to hold Son accountable for his promise.” Carson and Au-Yeung also contacted 50 SoftBank-backed companies to inquire about new jobs they had added, with many declining to comment, while others reported only marginal gains.
The 2019 ProPublica report reached a similar conclusion, noting that SoftBank’s investments had resulted in roughly 10,200 new or saved jobs at that point in time, meaning it wasn’t on pace to generate 50,000 jobs by the end of Trump’s term.
Publicly available information about some of the companies in which SoftBank invested also suggests that it may have struggled to reach the job creation benchmark it set. Some of the larger firms it backed, like Uber and WeWork, for example, oversaw wide-ranging layoffs which affected thousands of employees in 2019 and 2020. And a number of other startups that SoftBank funded were much smaller, so there was less potential for establishing new jobs at a large scale.
During Trump’s first term, SoftBank’s investment and jobs announcement came as the administration was poised to oversee a possible T-Mobile merger with Sprint, which the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission ultimately approved. This year, it comes as Trump weighs tariffs on goods from a number of US trading partners — including Japan, where SoftBank is headquartered.
SoftBank’s example, as well as the slew of CEOs — including Apple’s Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — recently traveling to meet with Trump, suggest the president-elect’s hold over big business is as strong as ever. But while announcements about new factories, billion-dollar investments, and spectacular job creation sound impressive, the results from Trump’s first term suggest the reality likely won’t match the promises that are made.
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