Trump hosted a who’s who of Silicon Valley on Thursday at the White House, including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Safra Catz, Bill Gates, and Tim Cook.
Notably missing: Elon Musk.
The dinner came after tech leaders met (opens in new tab) as part of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, chaired by first lady Melania Trump. It was the group’s second meeting since Trump signed an executive order in April seeking to implement AI into children’s education (opens in new tab).
The gathering is the latest example of the tech industry flattering Trump to stay in his good graces. Tech leaders’ remarks hinted at what they hope to get — or continue to get — in exchange for sucking up to the president.
During opening remarks at the dinner table, Trump reciprocated the flattery, saying his assembled guests were “leading a revolution in business” in developing artificial intelligence.
“This is taking our country to a new level. We’re leading the world,” Trump said. “We’re leading it because of the people around the table.”
Five things we learned from our bare-all interview with Sam Altman
Tech leaders in turn dished praise on the Donald, frequently pointing to his administration’s loosening of regulations (opens in new tab), which is allowing them to more easily build massive data centers for their resource-hungry AI projects (opens in new tab).
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thanked Trump for being a “pro-business, pro-innovation president” and called the task force meeting “wonderful.”
“Thank you so much for enabling this. We will invest a ton in the United States,” Altman said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked Trump for hosting the dinner before gushing to the rest of the bigwigs at the long, flower-laden table.
“I think all of the companies here are making huge investments in the country to build out data centers and infrastructure to power the next wave of innovation,” he said.
It’s hardly the first time Zuckerberg has cozied up to Trump, or the most blatant one.
Zuckerberg attended the president’s inauguration in January, and in the following months, he and his wife dramatically reshaped their namesake philanthropy. That included gutting internal diversity, equity, and inclusion teams; reportedly pulling funding for a school for low-income children in East Palo Alto; and declaring an end to all of its advocacy work, in an apparent move to appeal to Trump.
Several tech CEOs were notably absent from the meeting, including the world’s richest man, Musk, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Musk’s absence was no surprise, given his nasty, public falling out with Trump over the president’s signature “big beautiful bill.” Musk had derided the spending and tax cut package in an X post (opens in new tab) as “utterly insane and destructive” days before its passage in July. Musk is hardly alone in his criticism of the law, recent polling shows (opens in new tab).
Here’s the rest of the dinner guest list, per CBS senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs.