‘Terrible, Horrible Billionaire’: Data Center Opponents Roast Kevin O’Leary For Wild Claim

You could say they brought enough heat to make a data center implode.

Two women from a Utah-based political group are hilariously mocking Canadian billionaire Kevin O’Leary after he made a truly wild accusation about them on Fox News.

Kevin O'Leary looking like he’s gearing up for a fight at the Golden Globes in January.

MICHAEL TRAN via Getty Images

The “Shark Tank” star claimed — in a recent appearance on Fox News that he published to his X account — that Elevate Strategies, a Democratic group in Utah that has been loudly opposing his data center on social media, is being paid by China to spread negative “misinformation” about such projects online.

“If we were Chinese operatives, we would be the worst operatives in the entire world,” Gabi Finlayson, co-founder of Elevate Strategies, whom O’Leary accused of running a “cell” for the Chinese during his Fox News appearance, said in a very funny video responding to him Monday. “Someone alert Beijing that the payment portal to …[my] Amex bills is somehow broken.”

O’Leary is an investor in the proposed Stratos data center campus in Utah’s rural Box Elder County. The $100 billion facility he plans to build will span 40,000 acres and “would use more electricity than the entire state does in a year,” according to Fortune.

Petitioners react as the Box Elder County Commission announces the approval of a large data center on May 4, 2026 in Tremonton, Utah.

Natalie Behring via Getty Images

O’Leary took to Fox News to defend his precious investment.

“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid?” O’Leary asked. “Which adversary would want that? There’s only one. It’s China.”

O’Leary went on to say that he noticed a “massive spike in misinformation” about data centers on social media.

Kevin O’Leary spoke at a Trump event in January, though he was overshadowed by rapper Nicki Minaj and President Donald Trump holding hands.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Gesturing to a piece of paper he was holding in his hand, O’Leary claimed, “I’ve got some interesting data for ya” and explained that he got his “guys to [do] a deep dig into the IP addresses” that were criticizing his data center, finding that Elevate Strategies was rallying against his facility.

“Gabi, what are you doing?” O’Leary asked on Fox News. “And who’s paying you?”

Although O’Leary admitted he could be wrong, he went on to speculate that Finlayson and other Utah-based groups might be “proxies for the Chinese government.”

“And if they’re not, because I want them to be able to defend their name … Come out, come out wherever you are, and let’s audit your books and show the people of Utah you actually care about them,” O’Leary said.

In Finlayson’s response video, she and her fellow co-founder, Jackie Morgan, said O’Leary’s accusation was hard to take seriously.

“This is the very scary, very intimidating man that is threatening us,” Finlayson said, highlighting that O’Leary was wearing flip-flops while slamming them on Fox News.

“We are not taking the criticism of anyone who is wearing flip-flops and a suit on national television,” Morgan jabbed.

Finlayson and Morgan — who couldn’t stop laughing about how absurd they found this situation — also cracked that O’Leary must have used “Mr. Wonderful’s Nancy Drew Little Detective Agency” to dig up information about them.

“As a reminder, we run Democratic campaigns in the state of Utah. If we were in this to be making money, we would be doing literally anything else,” Morgan said.

She continued, “And you should know that, because your job is to give small business owners advice.”

“Yeah, you’d think that Kevin would understand the hellscape that is late-stage capitalism and consumerism that has led to [him] becoming a terrible, horrible billionaire who’s trying to ruin our state,” Finlayson piggybacked.

The women added that instead of auditing their finances, maybe someone should investigate the Stratos data center project and those involved in it.

“We’re just saying, we should maybe look into people that stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars off this project,” Finlayson said. “And let’s be so for real, and so clear: That is not us.”

She added: “But sure, let’s do the thing that all men who are scared and have no actual facts do – which is to accuse women who have a fully formed thought of being the problem and being Chinese operatives.”

At the thought of being a “Chinese operative,” Finlayson began to crack up.

“How are we making this video right now? Like, it’s so unserious,” she said.

In it, Elevate Strategies touches on how the business makes money and admitted that “it’s not exactly a cash cow,” explaining that it relies on small-dollar donors and paid subscriptions to its Substack.

“People who care enough about this state to throw us $6 a month so we can keep doing the deeply glamorous work of reading MIDA documents and Utah code until our eyes start twitching. There is no secret benefactor. There is no shadowy foreign government,” the statement reads.

And in case you didn’t quite get the message from both sarcastic responses, Finlayson is clearly not of fan of Mr. Wonderful.

“And keep my name out of your fucking mouth,” she said at the conclusion of her video.

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