Donald Trump has spent recent weeks declaring that artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer called that. It’s “super intelligence” or “SI,” according to the president. Trump has even succeeded in getting the tech oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jensen Huang to use the new name.
It all seems like a ridiculous waste of time and energy, but if you listen to folks on social media, it might be part of a larger conspiracy behind the scenes. People on X now insist Trump’s rebranding involves profiting from web domains that use .si, the top-level domain for Slovenia, the nation of 2 million people where First Lady Melania Trump is originally from.
Adam Cochran, a social media gadfly and crypto venture capitalist, wrote on Wednesday: “I believe Trump’s ‘SI’ Executive Order was ANOTHER criminal plot to enrich the Trump family. Insiders seem to have profited MILLIONS off of .si domain names before his Truth Social posts.”
Cochran notes that new domain registrations for .si were only dozens per day from 2023 to 2025, but things started to change this past summer. There were hundreds of registrations in June 2026, according to Cochran, and that accelerated to thousands in July.
Local media in Slovenia reports that registrations surged after President Trump’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22, where he said it would perhaps demonstrate his power over the world if other countries followed suit and called it super intelligence. “Let’s see if I have any power,” said Trump. “Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.”
Cochran also notes that Melania and Barron Trump both have Slovenian citizenship and suggests that the people who are buying these domains are Trump insiders who knew he would be floating this idea to rename AI to SI and wanted to profit from it. The domain registrations are private, but Cochran has found patterns that he says indicate these are people sympathetic to Trump, like the purchase of domains like “1776.si.”
But there are plenty of other possible explanations for this behavior that may not implicate Trump or even people with insider knowledge of Trump’s plans. For starters, the term superintelligence (typically styled as one word) was popularized in 2014 by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who wrote the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
The word superintelligence has traditionally meant a form of AI that’s beyond all human capabilities. Trump simply wants to hasten the process of declaring that AI is much more advanced than it really is. And he recognizes that AI has a branding problem, as young people are highly skeptical of the tech and basically everyone hates data centers. A recent poll showed that Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant in their communities than a data center.
Much of Cochran’s argument seems to ignore the fact that superintelligence predates Trump’s push for people to use the term, and people like Mark Zuckerberg were increasingly using it in the mainstream press this summer, advancing its popularity. “I wrote about why we believe the future is for everyone,” Zuck posted in a tweet on July 28, “More coming about a positive vision for a world with superintelligence soon.”
Zuckerberg was using the term in its old-school meaning, to distinguish it as something special beyond typical AI capabilities—the road to AGI, as it were. Zuck also wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that day, with the second line of the piece insisting: “In the next few years, people will be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity to create and discover extraordinary new things, build new businesses, express our ideas, learn new concepts, and improve our lives, health, relationships and careers.”
One possible explanation is that people are buying up .si domain names because superintelligence has been in the lexicon for quite some time now, and speculators saw a surge in the term’s use long before Trump ever uttered the phrase.
Is it possible that the Meta CEO is in on this conspiracy to make money from .si domains? Sure. But that’s far less likely than the simpler answer: This term has become more popular this summer because rebranding AI and claiming that something far more advanced is just around the corner serves the interests of the people who’ve spent billions on AI. When the year is through, capital investment in AI globally will reach $1 trillion in 2026, including $581 billion in the U.S., according to Goldman Sachs.
The New York Times has a new report today about how Meta classifies its data centers as experimental “pilot models” in order to get enormous tax breaks that were passed into law in the 1980s. The company cut $2 billion from its taxes in 2024 and $3.9 billion in 2025 with the tricky accounting, according to the Times. And it’s not really new. Back when it was called Facebook, the company claimed $4.1 billion of Zuck’s stock options were a research expense, providing a $355 million tax break.
There’s no denying that scoring the right domain name can be crucial for directing people to the right place. OpenAI launched Dot this week as its cutesy AI agent answer to Meta’s Muse. Much to the ChatGPT-maker’s chagrin, SpaceXAI apparently already bought the domain Dot.com to redirect to Elon Musk’s Grok Bot.
The tech oligarchs seem to be fully bought in on Trump’s rebranding of AI. Jensen Huang declared on Tuesday that they weren’t AI data centers anymore. They’re “superintelligence factories.” Musk called it AI while standing next to Trump on Tuesday before correcting himself and saying SI. Huang did the same on stage.
Huang: We used to call them data centers but the things that we're building now, these are really SI factories, super intelligence factories pic.twitter.com/QS96ExXGKL
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 29, 2026
Incredibly, the big AI accord signed by Trump and the big tech oligarchs on Tuesday misspelled United States as “Unites States,” if you can believe it. But it’s simply impossible in this moment to definitively say whether Trump is profiting from .si domain names. All the evidence is circumstantial.
There are many Trump-related insider trading stories where we may never get the full picture. Everyone can kind of see these suspicious moves in real time, but it’s hard to separate fact from fiction in a world where virtually everyone in power is a grifter, and they have the power to shut down investigations. The FBI reportedly shut down an investigation into a pay-for-play scheme involving Maine Sen. Susan Collins, and Trump’s Justice Department apparently did the same thing for border czar Tom Homan, who was accused of accepting $50,000 in a Cava bag to steer immigration-related contracts.
That said, there have been a handful of low-level people in MAGA-land with insider information who’ve been busted as sacrificial lambs. The U.S. Department of Justice charged an American soldier who allegedly made over $400,000 betting on Polymarket about when Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro would be ousted. He had inside knowledge that allowed him to make a good deal of money, just like Trump’s teleprompter operator who allegedly made $100,000 betting on the words Trump was going to say in speeches.
There’s been plenty of speculation that others in Trump’s orbit, such as his sons Eric and Don Jr., are perhaps making big stock market bets when Trump announces things like a peace deal with Iran, only to have it fall apart. These things are impossible to fact-check without major law enforcement action that provides the power to probe communications and do proper investigations. But you don’t need to dig that deep to see things that are just as egregious.
Trump’s sons have invested in businesses that are scoring huge contracts with the military, totaling at least $3.2 billion according to the Washington Post. And they’re raking in ridiculous sums from their crypto business, World Liberty Financial. President Trump himself made $2.2 billion last year while in office. That’s unprecedented, but it’s allowed to continue because laws are fake for the people in power.
