After winning the 2016 US elections, President-elect Donald Trump has been taking direct approaches to meet with people from different fraternities. Political leaders, celebrities and now it's time for the supreme leader-elect to meet the great minds of the tech world.
Invitations were sent out to Silicon Valley leaders last week, asking them to join Trump for a tech-industry summit to be held at Trump Tower in New York on Wednesday, December 14. The upcoming meeting is a controversial one mostly because of the regular attacks on the tech leaders during Trump's presidential campaign.
There has been a strong difference of opinion between the Trump administration and tech businesses, which led to severe opposing measures such as an open letter against Trump signed by 145 tech leaders, vocally disapproving Trump's views on immigration reform, encryption and other social issues. Despite all that, the invites were sent to many tech leaders and most of them have agreed to meet the leader of the free world.
Re/Code managed to get a hold of the names of the people attending the tech-summit this week. Check them out below:
Tim Cook – Apple CEO
Despite Trump calling a boycott on all Apple products during his campaign.
Larry Page – Alphabet CEO
Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook COO
Satya Nadella – Microsoft CEO
Chuck Robbins – Cisco CEO
Ginni Rometty – IBM CEO
Brian Krzanich – Intel CEO
Safra Catz – Oracle co-CEO
I plan to tell the President-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can," Catz in a statement. "If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the US technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever," she added.
Jeff Bezoz – Amazon CEO
This will be awkward considering his Washington Post's tough coverage on Trump during his campaign.
But a lot of tech leaders were not invited and some were invited, but won't be attending the summit on Wednesday. According to the report, bosses of tech companies Netflix, Salesforce, Slack, and Dropbox did not receive an invitation. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky did receive the invite, but will be out of the country at the time of the summit. Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and Tesla CEO is also likely to miss the meeting.
The invitations were signed by Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, chief of staff Reince Priebus and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
