What Happened At Trump's White House Dinner For Tech CEOs — And Why Elon Musk Was Nowhere To Be Seen

President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden dinner with technology and business leaders Thursday evening ended with renewed corporate commitment toward boosting domestic spending. 

The attendees included Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, venture capitalist David Sachs, who was named by Trump as artificial intelligence (AI) Czar immediately after he assumed office earlier this year, and Microsoft co-founder Steve Jobs.

Google parent Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as its co-founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Oracle’s Safra Catz and AMD’s Lisa Su also made it to the event. 

A Bloomberg report stated that Trump alleviated concerns about power availability to meet the demands of data centers mushrooming across the country amid the AI boom. 

In the president’s opening remarks delivered in the White House State Dining Room, he said, “We’re making it very easy for you in terms of electric capacity and getting it for you, getting your permits.”

Trump said the U.S. is leading China by a “great amount.” The president reportedly went around the dinner tables, prodding the executives to speak about their efforts to expand in the U.S. 

Meta’s Zuckerberg was the first to go, committing at least $600 billion in investments through 2028. “All of the companies here are building, just making huge investments in the country in order to build out data centers and infrastructure to power the next wave of innovation,” he said.

Apple’s Cook thanked Trump for setting the tone for the companies making major investments. In August, following Cook’s visit to the White House, Apple announced plans to augment its domestic investment by $100 billion. 

The president suggested that Apple would be exempt from the “substantial” semiconductor tariffs his administration plans for companies not investing enough in the U.S. “Tim Cook would be in pretty good shape,” he said.

Earlier on Thursday, the White House announced that Hitachi Energy has agreed to a $1 billion investment in U.S. critical electrical grid infrastructure, including a $457 million investment in a new Virginia-based large power transformer facility. 

Conspicuously absent from the dinner was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who also runs SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink and AI startup xAI. 

When one of his X followers wondered why the world’s richest man wasn’t invited, he said, “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.” Incidentally, the previous Biden administration had passed him over at its electric-vehicle (EV) summit held at the White House.

The snub was widely believed to be due to Tesla being a non-unionized company. Musk backed Trump during his election campaign last year, and was seen rubbing shoulders with the president on multiple White House appearances. He also headed the Department of Government Agency (DOGE) set up to identify wasteful government expenditure. 

The entrepreneur, however, fell out of favor and quit the quasi-governmental agency as he stepped up his criticism of Trump’s “big beautiful” tax bill, which he believed would lead to inflation.

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