When Kevin O’Leary, a.k.a Mr. Wonderful, found that his Shark Tank-ian pitch to the people of Utah to put up a massive data center on their land received a collective, “I’m out” from the citizenry, he insisted that the protestations weren’t coming from true Utahans but rather from a Chinese influence campaign—and swore he had “guys” who could prove it. On Thursday, he admitted that his source for those claims was his vivid imagination. “Recently I appeared on various news programs and would like to clarify that I have no evidence that Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, Gabrielle Finlayson, Taylor Knuth or Josh Katner are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party,” O’Leary wrote in a post on X Thursday. pic.twitter.com/9wzF9Fz0Lu — Kevin O'Leary aka Mr. Wonderful (@kevinolearytv) June 25, 2026 O’Leary’s backtracking comes after he claimed that several Utah-based groups, founded and operated by Utah-based activists, were actually getting their talking points and funding from China. During an appearance on Fox News, he claimed that he had experts who did a “deep dig into the IP addresses” of accounts criticizing his project and found “two cells inside of Utah” that were supposedly linked to China. He also alleged that there was a slush fund of “millions, hundreds of millions of dollars” made available to the opponents of his data center by foreign adversaries.