Trump’s Dinner Date with US Tech World’s ‘High IQ’ People: Tim Cook, Sam Altman among Invitees But Musk Missing

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday invited a high-powered group of tech executives at the White House to showcase the research on artificial intelligence and talk about the investments that companies are making around the country.

Addressing at the center of a long table surrounded by who he called ‘high IQ people’, Trump said, “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, Associated Press reported.

The executives, who gathered at the meeting, praised Trump and talked about their hopes for technological advancement while the President went around the table and asked executives about their investments in the country.

Responding to Trump’s question on investments, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said $600 billion and Apple’s Tim Cook echoed the same, while Google’s Sundar Pichai said $250 billion.

“What about Microsoft?” Trump asked. “That’s a big number.” To that, the company’s CEO Satya Nadella said it was up to $80 billion per year.

“Good,” Trump responded. “Very good.”

However, notably absent from this ‘high IQ’ gathering was the President’s once close friend and business tycoon Elon Musk. Once given the task to run the Department of Government Efficiency, under the Trump administration, the two had publicly parted ways earlier this year.

But what caught attention was the presence of one of Musk’s competitors in the AI space, Sam Altman of OpenAI.

Following the event, another afternoon meeting of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force was hosted, chaired by first lady Melania Trump.

“The robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction,” she said. Google’s Pichai, IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and Code.org President Cameron Wilson were among those participating in the task force.

Additionally, 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.