Following last week’s report that the President-elect Donald Trump is hosting a roundtable for the US tech giants on Wednesday, December 14th, there’s been some discussion regarding who will attend the said meeting and who won’t. Now, according to several sources with an intimate knowledge of the matter, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Apple will all be attending Trump’s first tech summit. Recode reports that the majority of the Silicon Valley decided to send their Chief Executive Officers to meet with the President-elect. More specifically, Alphabet is sending Larry Page, Satya Nadella will represent Microsoft, Ginni Rometty will be attending the roundtable on behalf of IBM, Brian Krzanich is going to promote Intel’s interests, and Apple is sending Tim Cook. The only exception to this is Facebook whose co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg won’t be attending the said meeting. Instead, Zuckerberg is reportedly sending Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook.
In addition to these names, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Oracle CEO Safra Catz have already been rumored to attend the said roundtable last week, and Recode’s sources seemingly corroborate that report. The meeting will be held at Trump Tower in Manhattan, New York City. Catz allegedly said she’ll assure the President-elect that Oracle will support his presidency, adding that Trump is capable of making the US tech sector “more competitive than ever.” Of course, Catz is referring to Trump’s likely plan to reduce regulation and taxation of US corporations.
Furthermore, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will also probably going to attend the upcoming meeting, Recode reports. Now, both Bezos and Cook will likely have quite a few things to talk about seeing how Trump attacked Apple and Amazon on numerous occasions during his presidential campaign. More specifically, the President-elect accused Amazon owner Jeff Bezos of antitrust violations thanks to his stake in The Washington Post, while he targeted Apple because the Cupertino-based company is outsourcing its production to China. According to recent reports, Trump had a hard time organizing this roundtable seeing how he’s often clashed with the Silicon Valley and most of the US tech giants have previously openly supported his political opponent, Hillary Clinton.
In addition to that, many tech companies like HP, Uber, Netflix, Slack, Dropbox, and Salesforce have already confirmed they won’t be attending Trump’s summit for numerous reasons, most of which are related to their previous political clashes with the President-elect. Interestingly enough, it seems that even Twitter won’t have any representation at the upcoming meeting despite being Trump’s favorite social network on the planet.