Newsletter 
Donald Trump’s surprising win during the US Presidential Election last month sparked much debate, especially in the tech industry which fears that the new administration may be bad news for its operations. According to a report from USA Today, the President-elect has now invited Silicon Valley’s top executives to join him at a roundtable scheduled to take place Wednesday, December 14th.
While most of Trump’s invitees are still unknown, USA Today claims that Safra Catz and Chuck Robbins, CEOs of Oracle and Cisco, respectively, will be attending the President-elect’s roundtable next week. Furthermore, Meg Whitman, the Chief Executive Officer at Hewlett-Packard already told Business Insider she has no intention of attending said meeting. On the other hand, tech giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Microsoft have remained reserved and are still declining to comment on the report. While Whitman is both a supporter and a donor of the Grand Old Party (GOP) that chose Trump as their Presidential nominee, she has criticized the President-elect throughout his year-long campaign and has openly supported Hillary Clinton in the past, so her decision isn’t all that surprising.
In overall, the upcoming roundtable is bound to be a heated one as most of the Silicon Valley has vehemently opposed Trump’s anti-immigration policies in the past. The US tech industry has been relying on importing foreign talent for decades, so it’s not surprising that it’s not thrilled with the President-elect’s ideas of how they should run their businesses. In addition to that, Trump directly clashed with the industry during his campaign, as he repeatedly called out Apple for outsourcing American jobs and criticized Amazon over antitrust issues pertaining to its involvement with The Washington Post.
However, that isn’t to say Trump has no friends in the tech industry. In fact, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who’s currently sitting on Facebook’s board of directors has allegedly assisted the President-elect with sending invites for the upcoming roundtable. In addition to Thiel, this meeting was reportedly organized by Trump’s next chief-of-staff Reince Priebus, as well as the President-elect’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. While the exact topic of this roundtable is still unknown, it’s bound to have something to do with Trump’s previous clashes with the tech industry. All in all, we should know more by next Wednesday.