Top tech names were on the guest list for the banquet thrown for President Trump during his second state visit to the U.K. on Wednesday.
The banquet seating chart included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; Apple CEO Tim Cook; venture capitalist and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks; Alphabet and Google president Ruth Porat; Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; and OpenAI’s Sam Altman,according to the New York Times.
This change reveals the shifting economic needs of the U.K. and U.S. in the age of AI, as well as therising prominence of technologyand its leaders in Trump’s second administration. Just this past year, numerous Big Tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and Apple have pledged to work with the government, fromproviding AI assistant toolsto government services tobuilding digital health ecosystemsfor the U.S. health industry.
The president has also taken a sharper focus on tech — criticizing Tim Cookfor Apple’s outsourced supply chain, signing an “anti-woke” AI order, and instructing the attorney general to investigateprivate companies receiving federal fundsthat have DEI programs deemed “illegal.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other tech leaders attended the president’s inauguration this year. And, in early September, President Trump threw a tech dinner with 33 top names in Silicon Valley, including Altman, Cook, and Zuckerberg. Musk, a former senior adviser to the president, once known as “First Buddy,” wasnot present at either dinner.
Source: Techcrunch
