Trump’s Party Draws Gates, Tim Cook & Zuckerberg — But Where Was Elon Musk?

Washington (The Uttam Hindu): US President Donald Trump hosted a dinner for the chief executive officers (CEOs) of the world's top technology companies at his official residence, the White House, on Thursday night. From Apple's Tim Cook to Microsoft's Satya Nadella, everyone attended this high-profile dinner focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI), but the name of Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk was missing from the list, who has reportedly distanced himself from Trump in recent days.

The dinner was held after a meeting of the Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force held at the White House. The meeting was chaired by First Lady Melania Trump. She opened the session by saying, "The robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction."

The guest list released by the White House included many big names. These included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Indian-origin CEOs also dominated the banquet, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Micron's Sanjay Mehrotra, Tibco Software's Vivek Ranadive, and Palantir executive Shyam Shankar.

Apart from these, more than a dozen senior officials of the IT world, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Blue Origin CEO David Limp, attended the dinner.

Interestingly, the dinner was earlier scheduled to be held in the White House's famous Rose Garden, which Trump has recently renovated like his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. However, due to bad weather and rain in Washington on Thursday afternoon, the event had to be shifted to the State Dining Room.