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US President Donald Trump hosted a group of high-tech executives at the White House on Thursday for dinner, but there was no one name on the guest list: Tesla, SpaceX, X boss Elon Musk.
Musk, once an intimate ally of Trump, who was previously tasked with the main clumsy designed to reduce wasted federal spending, did not appear to make exclusive cuts to senior technical leaders.
The pair were not in good condition from a very public feud earlier this year over the disagreement over Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Musk called “silly.”
Musk later intensified the line with Trump and took him to X and accused embarrassing investor Jeffrey Epstein of intentionally hiding files, in order to cover up his own involvement with the convicted sex offender.
Instead of Musk, there was Sam Altman, who heads Openai, the company responsible for ChatGpt, and one of Musk’s biggest rivals in the rapidly moving forward artificial intelligence space.
Among other reflections that changed Trump’s world loyalty, dinner included Jared Isaacman, who founded the payment processing company Shift4.
Isaac Man was a Musk ally to be chosen to lead NASA, and in Trump’s words he was “a complete Democrat,” so it was just to retract his nomination.
Trump grills executives on domestic investment
Trump presents research into AI and boasts the investments companies make around the US.
“This is taking our country to a new level,” he said in the center of a long table surrounded by what he described as “high IQ people.”
Dinner was the latest example of a sensitive relationship between Trump and tech leaders, some of which attended his inauguration.
Trump has been attracting attention from some of the world’s most successful businessmen, but businesses want to remain on the good side of the mercury president.
Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, lined up with Trump on the right, said that his company invested $600 billion (€514 billion) in the United States each year, while Apple CEO Tim Cook said the same thing. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, a subsidiary of Google, said his company is investing $250 billion (EUR 214.2 billion).
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the Seattle-based tech giant is investing up to $80 billion (€68.5 billion) a year.
Other notable names attending Thursday’s dinner include IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and Cameron Wilson, president of Code.org, among those on the task force.
The White House confirmed that the dinner guest list also includes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Google founder Sergey Brin, Open founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Cats, Blue Origin CEO David Lippi, Sanjay Melotra, Chibuco Software Chairman Vivik Lanadive, Palantia Executive Siam Sankar and Scale I One One.
Additional sources •AP
