President Trump will reportedly dine with top Silicon Valley executives at the White House on Thursday, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Notably missing from that list is Elon Musk, a former top ally of the Trump White House who led its DOGE initiative until an acrimonious public split between the X billionaire and the president over the direction of a major spending bill and accusations that Trump was in the Epstein files.
Thursday’s dinner will take place in the newly renovated White House Rose Garden, following an artificial intelligence event hosted by First Lady Melania Trump, according to The Hill, which first reported on the guest list.
Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are also reportedly expected to attend.
The apparent snub is a striking reminder of the distance between Trump and the former DOGE boss, whom the administration had previously entrusted with enormous power to cut tens of thousands of federal jobs, shutter agencies, scrutinize reams of sensitive government data, and redirect and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts and grants.
The cold shoulder is surely a reminder of how, in 2021, Musk was not invited to a Biden-era event at the White House celebrating electric carmakers, despite Tesla being the global leader in EV production at the time.
Musk appeared to rue the lack of an invitation for years afterwards.
Though Musk may be on the outs with Trump, the president has taken an aggressive approach to courting and, in some cases, directly intervening in the U.S. tech sector elsewhere, most recently with an August agreement for the U.S. to take a 10 percent stake in struggling chip maker Intel as part of the administration’s push to reshore American manufacturing and compete with China.
The president has also threatened to put a 100 percent tariff on computer chips unless companies build in the U.S., and the administration has also negotiated to receive 15 percent of Nvidia and AMD's revenues from the sale of the companies’ chips in China.
On the campaign trail, Trump helped sway some of Silicon Valley’s Democrat-leaning executives back to the Republican camp, and Vice President JD Vance is a former venture capitalist with strong ties to the tech world.
