Being unbelievably wealthy comes with powerful perks — like getting away with being too cheap to pay people the money they’re owed.

This, allegedly, is what Elon Musk is doing with one of the contractors who helped build his sprawling Colossus data centers near Memphis. 

The contractor, Ohio-based Darana Hybrid, has filed two liens against SpaceXAI — formerly known as xAI, before being merged into SpaceX — demanding that Musk’s firm pay more than $136 million for the work it’s done since 2024, the Memphis Business Journal first reported.

“The contractors are alleging they haven’t been paid for years of construction work,” Dima Amro, the reporter who broke the story, told Action 5 News.

Musk’s rapid construction of the two Colossus data centers in the Greater Memphis area has been the center of controversy. To quickly get the facilities online, the company brought in heavily polluting gas turbines that residents complain is making the air hard to breathe. Laggardly payments could be further evidence of the expedient means SpaceXAI took to get the data centers operational as quickly as possible.

According to the Shelby County Register of Deeds website, Darana Hybrid has filed two liens against SpaceXAI, one demanding $18 million for construction at the first Colossus facility near Boxtown, and another for more than $118 million for work at the second facility in Whitehaven.

And that could be just the start. Darryl Cuttell, Darana Hybrid’s owner, is reportedly expected to file more liens, bringing the total money owed to over half a billion dollars.

“So it looks like more liens are going to be coming to the surface,” Amro told Action 5 News. “About $400 million more worth of liens. I was told that that would be filed in Mississippi for the SpaceXAI facilities there.”

According to the reporting, two other companies, USW-Menard Inc and TorcSill Foundations, have also filed liens totalling more than $2.2 million for work done at SpaceXAI’s data center facilities.

The alleged hundreds of millions of dollars in missing money is upending Cuttell’s life, Amro says.

“He said he hasn’t slept in over four months. He’s lost a lot of weight. And he feels like there’s no future right now after filing those liens,” she told Action 5 News.

This isn’t the first time Musk has been accused of ripping off the smaller companies that helped build his business empire. A 2025 investigation by CNN found that contractors for Musk’s automaker Tesla had filed liens for more than $110 million of unpaid money in the past five years, with many of the contractors being small mom-and-pop operations.

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