As expected, some of the most important executives in the tech world managed to make their way to the Trump Tower apartment of President-elect Donald Trump yesterday afternoon to attend a summit. The meeting between Trump and tech executives like Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Alphabet Inc’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went better than anyone could have dared.
The meeting took place on the 25th floor of Trump Tower and besides the President-elect, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump attended as well. The three children sat at the head of the table. Also in attendance was Vice President-elect Mike Pence.
During the campaign, Trump attacked Apple and started a short lived boycott of the company. He complained about Apple producing its devices overseas, which lead Apple to start talks with its manufacturing partners about moving some iPhone production to the states. Apple wasn’t the only tech company that the billionaire real estate developer picked on during the campaign. In May, he said that the entire sector was overvalued. “You look at some of these tech stocks that are so, so weak as a concept and a company and they’re selling for so much money,” Trump told Reuters seven months ago.
And while most of the tech executives supported Hillary Clinton, they did show up on Wednesday. While some expected to get blasted by the billionaire, they were met by a less bombastic Trump who told them that “We’re going to make fair trade deals. We’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.”
Amazon’s Bezos, whose Washington Post was one of Trump’s biggest media critics, called the meeting ” very productive.” He added that he “shared the view that the administration should make innovation one of its key pillars, which would create a huge number of jobs across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech – agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing -everywhere.”
In the presence of reporters, Trump made it clear that the door is always open for these tech leaders to meet with him. “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. You call my people, you call me, it doesn’t make any difference. We have no formal chain of command,” said the President-elect.
source: Reuters
