EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
EMERGING TECH
Top players in tech meet with President-elect Donald Trump today
Donald Trump will hold a roundtable meeting Wednesday at his Trump Tower in New York that will include many of the biggest names in tech – some of whom supported his rival Hillary Clinton.
According to a report in USA Today, the arrangement, which surely will be awkward given the varying political views of the reported participants, was made by Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus, along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel.
There has been some speculation as to who exactly will attend the meeting but the names that have been talked about so far include many of the titans of tech: Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet Inc. CEO Larry Page, Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO Chuck Robbins; IBM Corp. CEO Ginni Rometty; Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich and Oracle Corp. CEO Safra Catz. Although Tesla Motors Inc. CEO Elon Musk was not confirmed, sources at the Wall Street Journal said that Musk will be in attendance.
What has perhaps come as some surprise is the fact that Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos was also on the list. The Amazon-owned Washington Post has been outright in its criticism of Trump while Trump himself has made his distaste for Amazon and Bezos clear in the past. Bezos did, however, congratulate Trump after his victory, a gesture seen as an offer of an olive branch.
Trump had also been in a wrangle with Tim Cook over Apple’s pro-encryption position, saying at one point that the public should boycott Apple products. Moreover, when Trump’s victory in the election was secured, many tech execs in Silicon Valley were not afraid to air their misgivings about the result.
At the moment it’s unknown what the agenda will be, but it seems likely issues such as privacy, automation and the state of manufacturing jobs – a particularly fraught issue for tech firms that have moved many jobs overseas in past decades – will be on the table.
According to Recode, a number of leading tech executives were not invited or could not attend. As it happens, Jack Dorsey, chief executive of Trump’s favorite social media platform, Twitter Inc., has stated that he was not invited to the summit.
Photo credit: Andrew Seaman via Flickr
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