Donald Trump On SoftBank: President-Elect Taking False Credit For Company’s $50 Billion US Investment?

After a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York City, the founder and CEO of Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, announced Tuesday his company will invest $50 billion in the United States and create 50,000 jobs. Using his medium of choice, the president-elect was quick to tweet that the deal would have never come to fruition had he not won the Nov. 8 election.

It is not possible to know what Masa (as Trump refers to Son in his tweet) told the president-elect in their private meeting, so there is no direct way to contest the claim Trump makes in the second tweet. But there are some facts that are known.

One, the $50 billion Son announced is actually a part of a $100 billion technology fund SoftBank has set up with the Saudi Arabian government, which was announced in October, weeks before Trump won the election. Currently, the fund, called Vision, has a $25 billion commitment from the Japanese company and $45 billion from the Saudi government, according to Bloomberg, and has plans to invest in technology companies worldwide.

Technology venture capitalist Chris Sacca was quick to point this out.

Two, SoftBank is far from being a new player in the U.S. technology market, having bought Sprint Corp. in 2013 for about $21.6 billion. It also wanted to merge Sprint with rival T-Mobile but the proposal was turned down by regulators on antitrust grounds.

Three, speaking to reporters outside Trump Tower after the meeting, Son said: “I just came to celebrate his new job. Because he said he would do a lot of deregulation, I said, ‘This is great, the U.S. will become great again.’”

Also, significantly, while both $50 billion and 50,000 jobs are big numbers, there are no details at all when the money will actually come to the U.S. or exactly how those jobs will be created. All Son said was the new jobs would come from investments in U.S. startups.