Former US President Donald Trump recently hosted a dinner at the White House, bringing together prominent figures from the global technology industry. The event, held in the State Dining Room after inclement weather necessitated a venue change from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, saw a gathering of influential tech leaders. Notably absent from the dinner was Elon Musk, the head of X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX, leading to speculation about his non-attendance. While his main AI competitor, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, was present, Musk’s absence raised questions about his relationship with the former president and the reasons behind his decision.
Among those in attendance were Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Tim Cook from Apple, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Micron chief Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive, Palantir’s Shyam Sankar, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, and Shift4 Payments boss Jared Isaacman.
