New York: Top US technology businessmen met with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower here on Wednesday in an attempt to align their positions and foster innovation in the country’s tech sector.
The tech titans met with Trump behind closed doors, although reporters and cameramen were admitted for the first few minutes of their discussion, reporting that the heads of firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Intel and Amazon were all seated with the President-elect around a large conference room table. “This is truly an amazing group of people,” Trump said at the start of the meeting.
“I want to add that I’m here to help you folks do well. … We’re going to try to have (the current post-election stock market) bounce continue and perhaps even more importantly we want you to keep going with the incredible innovation. There’s nobody like you in the world. There’s nobody like the people in this room.”
The President-elect added that he had to make “hundreds” of telephone calls to assemble all the top Silicon Valley chiefs for the confab.
“We’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders,” said Trump before reporters were asked to leave the room, leaving the group to its deliberations.
Seated with Trump at the meeting were three of his children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, along with Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Trump told the members of the group that there is no “formal chain of command” on his team and assured them they could call him or anyone on that team at any time.
Seated around the huge rectangular table were, among others, the top executives with Apple (Tim Cook), Microsoft (Satya Nadella), Alphabet (Larry Page and Eric Schmidt), IBM (Ginni Rometty), Cisco Systems (Chuck Robbins), Amazon (Jeff Bezos) and Intel (Brian Krzanich).
Also participating in the meeting were Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Oracle’s Safra Catz.
Trump, in his opening remarks, thanked financier Peter Thiel, seated to his left for his efforts to make the meeting come about.
