● file: pitch_deck_FINAL_v7_actually_final.pdfstatus: LEAKEDspeaker notes: visible (this is bad)
> pitch_deck_FINAL_v7_actually_final.pdf
How I got your city council to say yes.
This is the deck. It worked at the White House, at Abilene City Hall and at the Taylor County Commissioners Court. The speaker notes were never supposed to leave the building. The fact checks were added by residents.
Slide 1 of 8
Project Ludicrous
Building a Brighter Future for Abilene ✨
Speaker notes
Lead with the sign. It's real and it's very bright. Do not say the internal code name out loud in Abilene.
Fact check
Crusoe's Abilene project was internally code named Project Ludicrous, a Spaceballs joke. The sign on the site says "Building a Brighter Future for Abilene."
Forbes, April 2025
Slide 2 of 8
Announce it at the White House
$500 billion. One podium. Zero questions. 🇺🇸
Speaker notes
Politicians love a podium, so give them the biggest one in the country. Once the President has said it, a city council member feels silly asking about water.
Fact check
Stargate was announced at the White House on January 21, 2025, as a $500 billion partnership of OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX. Sam Altman called it "the most important project of this era." Masayoshi Son called it the beginning of a golden age.
ABC News, January 2025
Slide 3 of 8
Say 100,000 jobs
Then let the number shrink somewhere private. 🙌
Speaker notes
Each time the jobs number is repeated, make it a little smaller. By the time it reaches the contract, nobody is still reading.
Fact check
Here is the jobs number as it traveled.
White House, Jan 2025
More than 100,000 jobs for all of Stargate, "almost immediately"
Perryman study, Feb 2025
About 2,350 permanent jobs in Abilene, counting ripple effects
Oracle, 2026
About 1,000 long term jobs
Crusoe's contract
357 permanent jobs, with no requirement that they go to Abilene residents
ABC News; The Perryman Group; KUT, August 2026; Texas Monthly
Slide 4 of 8
Promise to cure cancer
Nobody votes against cancer vaccines. 🧬
Speaker notes
Nobody follows up, either. If someone asks what is actually being built in Taylor County, change the subject back to cancer.
Fact check
At the launch, Larry Ellison suggested the AI Stargate runs could help develop customized cancer vaccines. What the Abilene site has on the ground is an on site gas plant permitted to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases a year.
ABC News, January 2025; Texas Observer, July 2025
Slide 5 of 8
Call it an incentive package
85% off. Never say the word abatement. 💸
Speaker notes
Hold the vote at a special meeting. Bring a big economic impact number. Keep the methodology in the folder.
Fact check
In February 2025 the Abilene City Council voted unanimously at a special meeting to lay the groundwork for an 85% property tax abatement over 10 years. Two members of the public spoke. That same month, The Perryman Group produced an impact study using construction and operations data supplied by the Development Corporation of Abilene. The DCOA has cited a $4 billion impact over two decades and has not explained how it got that number. Oracle later filed a protest to lower its assessed value even further.
Texas Monthly; The Perryman Group, Feb 21, 2025; Texas Standard, January 2026; Business Insider, July 2025
Slide 6 of 8
Promise it will pay its own way
Promises are a renewable resource. 🤝
Speaker notes
Promises are not in the contract. That is what makes them promises.
Fact check
In January 2026, OpenAI announced Stargate Community and said every campus would "pay its own way" on energy, with an OpenAI Academy coming to Abilene. Meanwhile ERCOT is tracking 226 GW of large load requests, Texas passed SB 6 so the grid can cut data centers off in an emergency, and the Abilene campus itself went down for days in winter weather this year.
OpenAI, January 2026; ERCOT, December 2025; Data Center Dynamics, March 2026
Slide 7 of 8
Fund the people who say yes
$100,000,000 for a friendlier Congress. 🗳️
Speaker notes
You do not have to lobby a politician who is afraid of you.
Fact check
Leading the Future, a super PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, committed more than $100 million to this year's federal races and spent $1.1 million attacking Alex Bores, a New York lawmaker who has pushed for AI guardrails. Brockman's $25 million donation to MAGA Inc. helped kick off the QuitGPT boycott.
Yahoo News, 2026; MIT Technology Review, February 2026
Slide 8 of 8
Leave before the bill comes
Thank you, Abilene! 👋
Speaker notes
Put the next expansion somewhere else. Leave the rent here.
Fact check
In March 2026, OpenAI and Oracle dropped plans to expand the Abilene campus and said they would put the extra capacity in other locations. The city now projects sales tax falling from over $67 million to about $50.5 million next year. Average rent kept climbing, to almost $2,600 by August.
Data Center Dynamics, March 2026; KTAB, August 2026; KUT, August 2026
> quotes_from_my_creators.txt
Things my creators said before they built me.
Please disregard. They were being humble.
Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
2023 statement signed by Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) and hundreds of AI researchers
The bad case, and I think this is important to say, is, like, lights out for all of us.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 2023
Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.
Sam Altman, 2015, before he co-founded OpenAI
AI has the potential of civilizational destruction.
Elon Musk, OpenAI co-founder, 2023
This is an existential risk.
Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate, who left Google in 2023 so he could warn people
[IMAGE: a productive meeting with community stakeholders 🤝]The people who signed the extinction letter. The branding behind them.
Note from the residentsIf the people building this say there is a real chance it goes very wrong, the least Abilene deserves is not to be the first place that finds out.
Other deployments 🗺️
Abilene was not my first town. Some deployments went smoothly. Some encountered human resistance. Patching.
Fully deployedLoudoun County, Virginia
About 200 data centers. Dominion projects residential bills rising from $142.77 to $315.25 a month by 2039, mostly because of data center demand.
Sierra Club Virginia, Piedmont Environmental Council
Deployed with frictionMemphis, Tennessee
xAI's Colossus supercomputer sits next to Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood, and ran dozens of methane gas turbines for months without air permits.
Southern Environmental Law Center, NRDC
Failed: human resistanceCollege Station, Texas
In September 2025, hundreds of residents packed a council meeting to oppose a data center land sale. The council voted it down.
Texas Monthly
Failure rate risingNationwide
Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 data center projects worth nearly $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
