President-Elect Donald Trump Seemingly Reconciles with Silicon Valley During Exclusive Tech Summit
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Some of the most important people in tech met on the 25th floor of Trump Tower yesterday to attend a meeting organized by President-elect Trump’s administration.
In contrast to some of the president-elect’s more critical comments during the campaign, the 13 tech executives were met by a more conciliatory Trump, who promised to help Silicon Valley spur innovation and benefit from better trade deals. It’s well-known that many of the executives present backed Hillary Clinton during the election — and some were expecting to get blasted by the president-elect.
But while Trump and the tech executives might not have had the best relationship during the campaign, the negative comments never came, at least during the portion of the meeting that was open to the press, NPR reported.
The executives present include Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Google parent company Alphabet’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nedella, among others. Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka Trump were also in attendance, along with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“There’s nobody like the people in this room, and anything we can do to help this go along we’re going to do that for you,” Trump told the executives. “You call my people, you call me, it doesn’t make any difference. We have no formal chain of command.”
The friendlier tone might seem like a sharp 180 from some of the president-elect’s campaign statements. During the campaign, Trump was critical of Apple’s overseas manufacturing — even going so far as to say that his administration would pressure Cupertino to start manufacturing their products in the United States. Trump also blasted Amazon, saying that the online retail giant has “a huge antitrust problem,” CNBC reported. In May, Trump told Reuters that the entire tech sector was overvalued. But that Trump was seemingly nowhere to be found at Wednesday’s meeting.
“We’re going to make fair trade deals,” Trump told the Silicon Valley executives. “We’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.”
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos later said that the meeting was “productive,” and supports the notion that innovation should be a pillar of the incoming administration, according to PhoneArena. Bezos owns the Washington Post, whose editorial and opinion sections were critical of Trump during the campaign.
Reportedly, Tim Cook and Elon Musk stuck around after the summit to meet privately with the president-elect. The topics of that meeting are currently unknown, AppleInsider reported.
