A small group of tech leaders have apparently been summoned by President-elect Donald Trump’s to a tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to Recode. Here’s who’s apparently going to show up:
Those who will be attending (although most of the companies declined to comment to Recode) along with Page, Cook and Sandberg, include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
“I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can,” said Catz in a statement. “If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”
It’s not clear who the other attendees are, because many more invites went out late this week. Whether tech’s most high-profile exec, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is going is unknown, although he is an obvious invite.
But Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was invited, said sources, and he is likely to attend.
Bezos’ presence would be awkward, obviously, given how aggressive his Washington Post has been in its reporting on Trump and how many times the reality show star turned President-elect has attacked Amazon on a number of issues.
Here’s who is likely to give this event a pass:
The list of those not invited or invited but not going — the equivalent of the “I’m washing my hair” excuse, I guess — is even more interesting, including those from pretty much all of its most innovative companies. Some just got invites late this week, by the way, which shows how rolling the invites might have been.
Thus, no on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (invited, but out of country), no on Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (invited and a Thiel investment, but out of country), no on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, no on Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, no on Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and no on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.
In other words, most of the cool kids are staying West. “I think my invite got lost in the mail,” joked one. “Of course, this kind of thing will never happen again as of January.”
And prominent venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman are also not attending. Let that sink in — both Levchin and Hoffman worked with Thiel at PayPal and are close to him. Hoffman has been a big critic of Trump and continues to be.
Sources also said Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, another prominent and vocal Trump detractor, is also not going. During the campaign, the Republican stalwart — one of the few in Silicon Valley — called Trump a “dishonest demagogue” and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Let’s be fair, that’s pretty hard to walk back.
Also not attending is Mark Cuban who is no fan of Trump.
Here’s the thing, I have no idea what this could possibly acomplish. A lot of the tech industry doesn’t like this guy. Thus I really don’t see how they could possible suddenly play nice with this guy and his agenda. But it’s the sort of thing that could end up being a circus that might be worth watch for no other reason than cheap entertainment.
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Trump Summons Tech CEOs To Meeting
A small group of tech leaders have apparently been summoned by President-elect Donald Trump’s to a tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Wednesday, according to Recode. Here’s who’s apparently going to show up:
Those who will be attending (although most of the companies declined to comment to Recode) along with Page, Cook and Sandberg, include: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; and Oracle CEO Safra Catz.
“I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can,” said Catz in a statement. “If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”
It’s not clear who the other attendees are, because many more invites went out late this week. Whether tech’s most high-profile exec, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is going is unknown, although he is an obvious invite.
But Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was invited, said sources, and he is likely to attend.
Bezos’ presence would be awkward, obviously, given how aggressive his Washington Post has been in its reporting on Trump and how many times the reality show star turned President-elect has attacked Amazon on a number of issues.
Here’s who is likely to give this event a pass:
The list of those not invited or invited but not going — the equivalent of the “I’m washing my hair” excuse, I guess — is even more interesting, including those from pretty much all of its most innovative companies. Some just got invites late this week, by the way, which shows how rolling the invites might have been.
Thus, no on Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (invited, but out of country), no on Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (invited and a Thiel investment, but out of country), no on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, no on Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, no on Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and no on Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.
In other words, most of the cool kids are staying West. “I think my invite got lost in the mail,” joked one. “Of course, this kind of thing will never happen again as of January.”
And prominent venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman are also not attending. Let that sink in — both Levchin and Hoffman worked with Thiel at PayPal and are close to him. Hoffman has been a big critic of Trump and continues to be.
Sources also said Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, another prominent and vocal Trump detractor, is also not going. During the campaign, the Republican stalwart — one of the few in Silicon Valley — called Trump a “dishonest demagogue” and compared him to Hitler and Mussolini. Let’s be fair, that’s pretty hard to walk back.
Also not attending is Mark Cuban who is no fan of Trump.
Here’s the thing, I have no idea what this could possibly acomplish. A lot of the tech industry doesn’t like this guy. Thus I really don’t see how they could possible suddenly play nice with this guy and his agenda. But it’s the sort of thing that could end up being a circus that might be worth watch for no other reason than cheap entertainment.
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This entry was posted on December 12, 2016 at 9:18 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Donald Trump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.