Trump Made Big Tech’s ‘Super Intelligence’ Pitch Official, and Bought up to $25 Million of Meta

ByJames McCallef
Donald Trump signs an executive order at the White House.

President Donald Trump’s accounts bought $5 million to $25 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta on Aug. 21. The purchase appeared in a disclosure released Oct. 8, the same day Trump posted that anyone who says “Artificial Intelligence” is “THE ENEMY!” Most of the public wants this technology slowed: in a poll cited by Poynter, 68% backed a bill to slow AI down. The president has ordered his government to call it by the name its sellers prefer, part of what Axios described as an effort by Trump and the CEOs to “shed AI’s toxic branding.”

Here is the Truth Social post, as Gizmodo transcribed it:

“The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”

The post enforces an order Trump signed on Sept. 29. According to the White House fact sheet, the order requires agencies to replace “AI” with “SI” in federal communications. It also directs the president’s science adviser to propose a federal definition. The fact sheet says the new name “conveys the true capabilities of the technologies being developed today.” The companies use that word for a machine smarter than any human, and they say they have not built one. Trump previewed the rename at the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 22.

On signing day, leaders from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” Axios reported. Anthropic signed despite the administration’s ban on Anthropic from government work in March. OpenAI signed too. Its president, Greg Brockman, gave $25 million to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The public has not adopted the new term. In a YouGov poll cited by Axios, 53% preferred “artificial intelligence” and 9% preferred “super intelligence”. That is a margin of nearly six to one for the word Trump calls “a fake word.” The government has not fully adopted it either. Gizmodo reported that the ai.gov graphic was changed to read “SI” while si.gov sits dormant, and White House pages still say “AI”. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, replied that “Artificial Intelligence is a term historically reserved for politicians.”

What ‘superintelligence’ means, in the labs’ own words

The word already had a meaning. Philosopher Nick Bostrom defined it in 1998 as “an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field”. The companies now repeating it use it the same way, and they describe it as a goal they have not reached.

PolitiFact concluded that AI exceeding human thinking in nearly every field “doesn’t yet exist”. It called today’s systems “jagged,” meaning brilliant at some tasks and inept at others. The independent ARC Prize Foundation launched a puzzle benchmark called ARC-AGI-3 on March 25. At that launch, humans scored 100% and the best frontier AI model scored 0.51%. Google DeepMind’s framework for grading AI ranks ChatGPT at Level 1.

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane told CNN on Oct. 2 that the definition is “subjective,” Poynter reported. His own CEO had already written about superintelligence “in the true sense of the word.”

The fact sheet says the name describes “technologies being developed today.” The people developing those technologies say it describes something they have not built. The order takes the word for the destination and paints it on the current stop.

A label reading “SUPER INTELLIGENCE” is pasted over a chatbot window.

The CEOs took up the label quickly. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said “I am going to get good at this” and called data centers “super intelligence factories.” Elon Musk posted “No more AI / SI / It’s better” alongside the cover of Bostrom’s book, and said SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told Bret Baier on Fox News on Oct. 7 that “artificial sort of means fake,” in a clip posted by Aaron Rupar. Zuckerberg used the word repeatedly at the Meta Enterprise Platform launch.

The order takes the word for the destination and paints it on the current stop.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone says Zuckerberg used the word first and points to the July 2025 essay. He is right, and that is the problem. The word comes from the labs’ fundraising and recruiting vocabulary, and the government has now made it its official term.

Meta has also paid Trump directly. It donated $1 million to his inauguration and in 2025 agreed to a roughly $25 million settlement of his lawsuit over his Facebook suspension. Most of that settlement is designated for his presidential library.

Axios’s headline on the accord described what the rename is for: Trump and the CEOs are trying to shed AI’s toxic branding. Meta needs a better brand. It guided its 2026 capital spending to $130 billion-$145 billion, and its second-quarter free cash flow was $784 million. Spending at that rate depends on investors believing the result is worth it. The arrangement has three parts. The companies need investors to keep paying for the build-out. The government gives them a word that says the build-out has already succeeded. And the president holds their stock.

Trump’s trades in the companies that adopted ‘super intelligence’

Trump’s accounts have traded in 2026 in every company whose leader took up the word. They have also traded Microsoft, which runs its own superintelligence lab.

Trade Disclosed range
Nvidia buy, Feb. 10 $1M-$5M
Microsoft sale, July 20 $5M-$25M
Amazon sale, July 20 $5M-$25M
SpaceX bonds buy, Aug. 18 $1M-$5M
Meta buy, Aug. 21 $5M-$25M

Several of the purchases came shortly before good news for the company. An earlier Nvidia buy of $500,000-$1 million on Jan. 6 came a week before the Commerce Department approved some Nvidia chip sales to China. The Feb. 10 Nvidia buy came a week before Nvidia and Meta announced a multi-year GPU deal on Feb. 17. The SpaceX bonds were bought two days before a space-transportation policy signing.

The trading goes in both directions. In the first quarter, the accounts sold $5 million-$25 million each of Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, according to GIGAZINE’s summary of reporting by CNBC and Bloomberg. The Aug. 21 Meta buy followed a $1 million-$5 million Meta sale on June 18. In August the accounts also sold $1 million-$5 million of AMD and up to $1 million of Nvidia. August had 517 transactions in total, with purchases of at least $44.2 million against sales of at least $30.1 million.

The Trump Organization’s defense is that nobody in the family picks the trades. A spokesperson told NOTUS:

“President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.”

That account leaves out a choice someone made. In the first year of his second term, Trump largely avoided stocks and held corporate and municipal bonds, NOTUS reported. In 2026 the money moved into stocks. The accounts made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, compared with 380 in the last quarter of 2025. Eric Dayton of The Wealth Alliance, who has no role in the trades, said: “In my more than 40 years of working on Wall Street, this level of trading volume is unprecedented by any standard.”

The White House gave a different explanation. Spokesman Davis Ingle said “President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest.” An outside bank and his children are two different arrangements, and the administration has offered both.

Suppose the first explanation is accurate. The accounts reportedly follow automated model portfolios benchmarked to indexes such as the Schwab 1000, which tracks the largest U.S. companies. Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are near the top of that index. A portfolio built to track the biggest American companies gains when the government talks up the biggest American companies, whoever places the orders.

A portfolio built to track the biggest American companies gains when the government talks up the biggest American companies, whoever places the orders.

Matthew Tuttle, CEO of Tuttle Capital Management, said the president “is in a position to know everything, so any stock he buys will raise serious questions.” In February’s State of the Union, Trump backed a ban on stock trading by members of Congress. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat, shouted back: “How about you first?” Trump’s family business already sells traders faster delivery of his posts.

Jensen Huang receives the National Medal of Science from President Donald Trump.

The filing showing up to $1.6 million in Nvidia purchases was released on Oct. 8, the day Trump presented Jensen Huang with the National Medal of Science. The order asks the president’s science adviser to write a federal definition of super intelligence, and that definition has not been written. Bostrom wrote one in 1998, and no product on sale meets it.

The rename keeps expanding. After the accord, Trump announced a Super Intelligence Force. He said it will ensure America “is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the internet”. In September, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and five other Democratic senators asked Meta about its political spending and about any benefits it has received from Republican policies.

The July filing became public on Sept. 22, and the August filing on Oct. 8. The September filing will be the first to cover the week between the U.N. speech and the order, along with the first trades made after the government adopted the new word.

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