President Trump hosts at White House, showcases investments by Tech giants in US
05-Sep-2025.
At the White House on September 4, President Donald Trump hosted a high-powered group of tech executives as he showcased research on artificial intelligence and boasted of investments that companies are making around the United States.
Trump said at the center of a long table surrounded by what he described as "high IQ people", "This is taking our country to a new level".
It was the latest example of a delicate two-way courtship between Trump and tech leaders, several of whom attended his inauguration. Trump has exulted in the attention from some of the world's most successful businesspeople, while the companies are eager to remain on the good side of the mercurial president.
While the executives praised Trump and talked about their hopes for technological advancement, the Republican president was focused on dollar signs. He went around the table and asked executives how much they were investing in the country.
Said Meta's Mark Zuckerberg $600 billion, Apple's Tim Cook said the same. Google's Sundar Pichai said $250 billion.
"What about Microsoft?" Trump said. "That's a big number."
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said it was up to $80 billion per year. "Good," Trump responded. "Very good."
Notably absent from the guest list was Elon Musk, once a close ally of Trump who was tasked with running the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had a public breakup with Trump earlier this year.
Sam Altman of OpenAI, at the table instead was one of Musk's rivals in artificial intelligence. In another reflection of shifting loyalties in Trump's world, the dinner included Jared Isaacman, who founded the payment processing company Shift4.
Isaacman was a Musk ally chosen by Trump to lead NASA, only to have his nomination withdrawn because he was, in Trump's words, "totally a Democrat."
The dinner was expected to be held in the Rose Garden, where Trump recently paved over the grassy lawn and set up tables, chairs and umbrellas that look strikingly similar to the outdoor setup at his Mar-a-
Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
But because of inclement weather, officials decided to move the event to the White House State Dining Room.
The event followed an afternoon meeting of the White House's new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which first lady Melania Trump chaired and some tech leaders participated.
"The robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction," she said,
Among those participating in the task force wer,e Pichai, IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and Code.org President Cameron Wilson.
The White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner also included: Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates; Google founder Sergey Brin; OpenAI founder Greg Brockman; Oracle CEO Safra Catz; Blue Origin CEO David Limp; Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra; TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive; Palantir executive Shyam Sankar; Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang; and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
