How Musk Could Monetize Data of U.S. Citizens to Train A.I. and Sell Access to Competitors

Access to quality datasets is predicted to be the most crucial factor for continuing to develop and train AI. So why is nobody asking questions about the giant supercomputers and data centers Musk is quietly building around the world?

Note: This was originally published on my Substack in Jan 9th. Since then I have learned even more very suspicious information, and will be writing a follow up to this post soon.

One of the earliest actions taken by the Trump administration against federal agencies and employees, involved a sudden demand for an investigation into the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices of United States science institutions, such as the National Institute of Health (NIH) to investigate how tax dollars were being spent. Elon Musk has used his position in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access data and issue sweeping changes to several government agencies including the NIH, USAID, and the U.S. Treasury, despite lacking security clearance. Although data access is allegedly needed in order to determine “government waste” and improve efficiency, there has been a lack of transparency surrounding DOGE and how they are actually using the data. There have been several theories about how Musk could potentially be using the data, but surprisingly I have not heard anyone mentioning how the giant supercomputer Musk built in 2024 could possibly be involved. This might be due to the fact that the supercomputer itself was a very secretive project. Musk’s company Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI) was founded in 2023. The main headquarters seems to be located in Nevada, but there are several xAI locations throughout the United States including California, Georgia, and Tennessee. The ultimate goal of xAI is to create artificial intelligence by using machine learning, which will be capable of providing an answer to everything (his description, not mine). Memphis, TN was chosen to house the supercomputer in 2024, and from the beginning of its construction, the entire project has been shrouded in mystery. Individuals involved in the construction as well as those working inside of the building have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, and even the residents in the surrounding community have very little knowledge of what goes on inside of the walls of the building. In December of 2024, an announcement was made that the supercomputer would be expanding, and requiring more land and resources. In this post, I would like to discuss how the data Musk has gained access to in his “unpaid” role could be of tremendous value to his private company as well as his U.S. and global competitors. The new administration began their attack on “government waste,” by first focusing on the NIH. On January 21st, 2025, one day after President Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were told to halt all public communications by the acting head of the department. A memo was issued to all operating division heads, including the NIH, telling them to refrain from all external communications until a "presidential appointee” could take over. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. President Trump's nominee for HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was recently approved during Senate committee hearings last week, and although a date for the final Senate vote has not yet been announced, Mr. Kennedy is very likely to receive a full Senate confirmation. Although Mr. Kennedy has not yet been confirmed, HHS has made some very big changes and decisions based on recommendations from DOGE employees. "Investigations" into DEI practices to identify wastes of tax payer dollars, have resulted in temporary funding freezes that were originally put into place until investigative reports could be generated. Despite full cooperation and frustratingly little push back, more troubling announcements were made this past week, with indirect/overhead costs available from government funded grants being slashed drastically. The general consensus among researchers is that this will likely be the death of research at most large universities and medical schools. An internal official for the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced during a meeting that as a result of these changes, NSF is planning to lay off up to half of it's staff in the next two months. There seems to be no question that the loss of this funding will not only be putting researchers and staff of many institutions out of a job, it will result in the United States no longer being able to produce the level of research that makes us competitive with other countries such as China. In other words, it seems to be undermining a level of “greatness” the United States currently has on a global scale. Over the past week, there have also been reports of DOGE staff showing up at NIH sites as well as the CDC campus. While it is unknown what exactly DOGE employees were doing at these locations, posts on private social media suggested they may be looking for any data that could be monetized. While this is speculation, it may not be completely off base. In fact, it actually seems to be a very logical conclusion, and one that we should all be asking about. Although most employees of the NIH and other government agencies are aware of serious penalties involved in the unauthorized removal of data, DOGE has proven time and again that the rules just don't apply to them. They are special snowflakes doing very important work that we couldn't possibly wrap our little minds around, and we need to get out of the way so they can keep making us great again. Although this attitude may be a new approach to government, private companies such as Meta/Facebook and Equifax are often brought up when discussing private data and the large fines these companies have paid following data breaches. However, given that many of these companies are owned by some of the richest people in the world, there is little evidence to suggest that these legal fees are seen as much more than a slap on the wrist, and seem to serve as little incentive to ensure personal data is safely handled. NIH data repositories include both public and private data collected during human and animal clinical trials and experiments. NIH data is protected under laws such as the Privacy act, however, there does seem to be some question regarding the application of current data protection laws when it comes to the digital transfer of data to outside sources. It seems to be a very complex issue that is honestly a bit over my head, but I'm including links to some relevant information I was able to find. If I'm correctly understanding, data moved to a physical hard drive and removed from a location such as an NIH site without permission, is a fairly clear violation of these laws. When data is digitally transferred to another location, for example a supercomputer, legal implications of the Privacy act, which was first created several decades ago, seem to be a bit of a grey area. If I'm wrong about this, please let me know and I will correct this post. Despite the question of legality, there are still several issues that should be alarming to most individuals. For example, as an article published in Foreign Affairs on Friday (February 7th) asked, does DOGE access to sensitive data in the Treasury Department pose a national security risk? Although Trump lawyers maintained that Musk had not personally accessed sensitive data during a hearing before a Federal judge this week (they say nothing about access by his DOGE employees) "American adversaries surely see an espionage and blackmail bonanza. Less obviously but just as crucially, U.S. allies, accustomed to doing business and sharing information with the United States on a day-to-day basis, are likely to take a hard look at their typical routines. Will they be willing to continue operating as usual?" There should also be many concerning aspects of a possible NIH data breach for everyday citizens. Data collected during human clinical trials includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which again, while normally protected by HIPAA laws, may not face the same repercussions if the data is removed via digital transfer. Despite the potential question of any real legal penalties and repercussions, it should be very concerning for most individuals to consider the possibility of information such as a social security number, being used to link health data from the NIH with personal data obtained by the unauthorized access of DOGE employees to Treasury department data. The Treasury department seems to be the data on most people’s radar due to unaccounted access to federal funds. Why would Musk and DOGE care about NIH and other government data repositories anyway? It turns out that dwindling availability of data for training AI models, could make access to large repositories of data such of those at the NIH, CDC, Treasury department, and other government agencies an extremely valuable resource. One month ago today, on Thursday January 9, 2025 (and less than two weeks before Trump's inauguration and the subsequent changes announced at the NIH) an article in the Guardian covered Elon Musk's future plans for AI data. The article states that "AI companies have run out of data for training their models and have exhausted the sum of human knowledge." Musk states that companies exhausted training data last year, and suggests that the only option would be to turn to "synthetic" data generated by AI models, however, he notes the synthetic data generation process carries the risk of generation of inaccurate and nonsensical output of data by AI models termed "hallucinations." In other words, this is not an ideal solution, but one that may be necessary given the lack of data. Andrew Duncan, the director of foundational AI at the UK's Alan Turing institute seemed to agree with Musk’s statement, and cited an academic paper which predicted data for AI models would run out by 2026. Duncan further stated that, "High-quality data, and control over it, is one of the legal battlegrounds in the AI boom. OpenAI admitted last year it would be impossible to create tools such as ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, while the creative industries and publishers are demanding compensation for use of their output in the model training process." As I mentioned, Musk began his own AI company (XAI) in 2023, and built a supercomputer for this purpose, located in Memphis, TN. Recently, an announcement was made that XAI will be expanding, and requiring more land and resources. This announcement has upset residents living near the site where XAI supercomputer is located, and in an article released today, February 9th by local Memphis newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, residents have reported feeling as though their input on the matter has been completely disregarded. There is no evidence at this time of data from any of these government agencies being directly accessed by Musk, or plans for eventual access. However, the timing of the announcement planning for XAI expansion does seem as though it should warrant some additional coverage by the media. Interestingly, as of this past Wednesday, a webpage for V2Solutions, a company that refers to itself as a Digital Engineering partner, included information about XAI and Data Annotation, which referenced examples of uses for biological data used to create AI medical diagnostics tools. https://www.v2solutions.com/cs-intersection-of-data-annotation-and-explainable-ai/ While the webpage appears to no longer be publicly available, I am including images of the page (taken on Wednesday) below. References for the rest of the information included in this article will appear below the images. Regardless of any actual legal repercussions, if this is indeed the ultimate plan Musk has for any data potentially attained during his time at DOGE, the American people deserve to know. His exploitation of not only the researchers that generated the data but also the tax payers that provided the funding for that research, speaks volumes. I hope his anti-science decision making skills and actions while head of the Department of Government Efficiency will be what he is remembered for in future history books. Further, I feel it should be noted, that the recently announced changes regarding funding for indirect costs of government grants seem to indicate there is no plan to generate replacement data once this data also becomes "exhausted." I am unsure if this is just another example of the lack of foresight typical for such a genius. Maybe he actually believes the same quality of valuable data, could actually be collected without the majority of employees that all contributed to making it possible. Why do we need xAI to explain anything when Musk already seems to know everything? While I am not a whistle blower, our "free" press does not seem to find this information worthy of much news coverage. Although all information in this post is publicly available (if you're willing to go hunting for it), I also would like to point out given some recent examples of potential "red collar crime," I have no intentions of falling down any stairs, out of a window, or harming myself. I am aware how paranoid that sounds, but if there was nothing to worry about, there would seem to be no need to try to keep this information under wraps. It seems as though we are indeed living through a government conspiracy, and people deserve to know the full truth about what is really going on. As most people are aware, we are in the middle of an ongoing coup, and given how federal employees are being treated, it seems that these people view anyone not on their level as disposable. However, their actions are leaving those of us born without the connections that make democracy and merit so unnecessary for success, with few other options than to speak out while we still can. For us, democracy is worth fighting for. Images from V2 solutions regarding xAI data:

References -Whistleblowers and “red collar” crime: Https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/openai-copyright-law.html https://fortune.com/2025/02/08/openai-whistleblower-suchir-balaji-death-police-investigation-san-francisco-family-questions/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/palantir-alex-karp-trump-private-prisons-profiteers/ -Musk AI data and supercomputer expansion: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/09/elon-musk-data-ai-training-artificial-intelligence https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/money/business/development/2025/02/08/south-memphis-residents-speak-out-against-xai-expansion/78299574007/ https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/elon-musk-does-doge-pose-national-security-risk -Data privacy laws and digital implications: https://www.csoonline.com/article/567531/the-biggest-data-breach-fines-penalties-and-settlements-so-far.html https://oma.od.nih.gov/DMS/Pages/Privacy-Program-Privacy-Act.aspx https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9444468/ https://sharing.nih.gov/data-management-and-sharing-policy/sharing-scientific-data/repositories-for-sharing-scientific-data -Trump administration changes to NIH: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/22/nx-s1-5270866/hhs-cdc-health-communications-trump https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-happening-inside-nih Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.