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US President Donald Trump hosted a group of tech executives at the White House on Thursday for dinner, but one name was notably absent from the guest list, Tesla, SpaceX and X boss Elon Musk.
Musk, once a close ally of Trump’s, and who was previously tasked with leading a new government agency designed to cutback on waste federal spending, did not appear to make the exclusive cut of senior tech leaders.
The pair have not been on good standing since their highly public feud earlier this year over disagreements on Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’, which Musk called “idiotic”, arguing that it will push federal expenditure and debt levels to new heights.
Musk later intensified the row with Trump, taking to X to accuse Trump of deliberately concealing disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s files to cover up his own involvement with the convicted sex offender.
Instead of Musk, Sam Altman, who heads OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, and one of Musk’s biggest rivals in the rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) space, was present.
In another reflection of shifting loyalties in Trump’s world, the dinner included Jared Isaacman, who founded the payment processing company Shift4.
Isaacman was a Musk ally chosen by Trump to lead NASA, only to have his nomination withdrawn because he was, in Trump’s words, “totally a Democrat.”
Trump grills executives on domestic investments
Trump showcased research on AI and boasted of investments that companies are making around the United States.
“This is taking our country to a new level,” he said at the centre of a long table surrounded by what he described as “high IQ people.”
The dinner was the latest example of a delicate relationship between Trump and tech leaders, several of whom attended his inauguration.
Trump has exulted in the attention from some of the world’s most successful businesspeople, while the companies are eager to remain on the good side of the mercurial president.
While the executives praised Trump and talked about their hopes for technological advancement in the country, the Republican president was more focused on money. He went around the table and asked executives how much they were investing in the country.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who flanked Trump on the right, said $600 billion (€514 billion), while Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, said the same. Alphabet CEO – of which Google is a subsidiary to – Sundar Pichai said his company was investing $250 billion (€214.2 billion).
After deliberately seeking them out in his questioning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the Seattle-based tech giant is investing up to $80 billion (€68.5 billion) per annum. “That’s a big number,” Trump responded. “Good, Very good.”
Some of the other notable names who attended Thursday’s dinner include IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and Code.org President Cameron Wilson were among those participating in the task force.
The White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner also included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google founder Sergey Brin, OpenAI founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive, Palantir executive Shyam Sankar and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.
Additional sources • AP