Trump hosted a who’s who of Silicon Valley at the White House Thursday, 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 as part of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, chaired by first lady Melania Trump. The group’s meeting was the second since Trump signed an executive order in April seeking to implement AI into children’s education.
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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 may 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.”
Tech leaders in turn dished praise on the Donald, frequently pointing to his administration’s loosening of regulations that's allowing them to more easily build massive data centers for their resource-hungry AI projects.
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 sitting 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 president 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 top 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 the nasty, public falling out between him and Trump over the president’s signature “big beautiful bill.” Musk had derided the spending and tax cut package in an X post as “utterly insane and destructive” days before its passage in July. Musk is hardly alone in his disliking the recently-passed law, recent polling shows.
Here's the rest of the guest list, per CBS senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs: