WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump hosted a dinner on Thursday night at the White House for some of the most important people in the tech business. The long list of guests, which included tech giants and innovators, had at least five CEOs of Indian descent, showing how important they are becoming in American business.
The Indian-born executives who were there were:
Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google.
Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft.
Sanjay Mehrotra is the CEO of Micron.
Chairman of TIBCO Software Vivek Ranadive
Shyam Sankar is an executive of Palantir.
The event took place in the newly decorated Rose Garden at the White House and was attended by tech titans like Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Some other important people who were there were Sergey Brin, the founder of Google; Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle; and David Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX and a previous close ally of Trump, was not at the high-powered meeting. Some reports say that their public feud, which started a few months ago, was caused by disagreements over policy and Trump’s decision not to choose Jared Isaacman, a Musk associate, to be the head of NASA. Isaacman, the CEO of Shift4 Payments, was on the guest list and, surprisingly, went to the dinner.
The luncheon came after a meeting of the new Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force at the White House, which was led by First Lady Melania Trump. President Trump signed an executive order in April 2025 that set up the task group. Its goal is to make sure that American kids and teachers are more knowledgeable and skilled with AI so that the US stays at the front of the digital revolution. Some of the people that were at the task force meeting were Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, and Arvind Krishna, the chairman and CEO of IBM.
Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House, talked about how important the event was. He said that the “Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or maybe even the world.” He also said that the President was looking forward to “welcoming top business, political, and tech leaders for this dinner and many more to come.”
The Trump administration’s approach to top tech executives, especially Indian-American leaders, is seen as a way to align with the IT sector and its interests, even though some in the business have criticized the policies it is pursuing.