On Thursday, President Donald Trump held a high-profile dinner at the White House for the top IT leaders in the US. The meal was mostly on the future of AI and investment in the US. There were a lot of smart people at the event, like Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. However, Elon Musk was not there.
The meal was shifted from the Rose Garden to the White House State Dining Room because of bad weather. This showed how complicated and changing the relationship is between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley. The President, who was sitting between First Lady Melania Trump and Zuckerberg, walked around the table and asked each executive about their company’s interests in the US.
The Musk Controversy: At first, reports said that Elon Musk wasn’t on the guest list. This was a big deal because it showed that he and the President had a public fight earlier this year. But the billionaire then made it clear on his social media platform X that he was invited but couldn’t go. Someone from my company will be there. The White House has since verified that Musk was on the guest list, although it is still unclear if a representative from his company went in his place. Sam Altman of OpenAI, one of Musk’s main competitors in AI, was at the dinner, which was a surprise.
The guest list included some of the most important people in the computer sector, such as Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), who are all Indian-American leaders. People who were there welcomed the administration’s programs. Bill Gates praised the COVID-19 vaccine initiative, and Sundar Pichai thanked the President after a recent important antitrust case against Google was thrown out. The meal came after a meeting of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which is led by First Lady Melania Trump. This made AI an even bigger priority for the administration.