Meeting with tech leaders, Trump says they can call him or his team any time, Thiel is “ahead of the curve”, and administration will work on “fair” trade deals
FOUR—are the president-elect's children. That is 16% of everybody in the room...”—@msuster http://bothsidesofthetable.com/ ... Mark Suster / @msuster : I will separate my business interests from the presidency. But my son's who run my business will attend key meetings http://qz.com/... Jim Roberts / @nycjim : GOP says Twitter wasn't invited to tech summit because table was too small. (Plenty of room, tho, for Trump kids.) http://qz.com/... http://twitter.com/... Felix Salmon / @felixsalmon : While you were distracted by the children, look which princeling got prime table placement http://qz.com/... http://twitter.com/... John Cassidy / @johncassidy : Way to go @karaswisher for calling out SV billionaires for silent complicity in Trump Tower photo-op. Pretty pitiful. @cnn : .@karaswisher: Silicon Valley execs didn't bring up some issues in Trump meeting because they want to “get along” http://snpy.tv/2hvHfFA Imraan Siddiqi / @imraansiddiqi : That is a diverse group of white people. http://twitter.com/... Alex Howard / @digiphile : “The president-elect...asked the executives...if they could...apply data analysis...to detect &...get rid of government waste” http://www.nytimes.com/... Alex Howard / @digiphile : Notable absences: @jack @finkd @larryellison @Benioff @marissamayer @MegWhitman @MichaelDell @devinwenig, Lowell McAdam & Randall Stephenson http://twitter.com/... Steven Tweedie / @stevetweedie : 2011 vs 2016pic.twitter.com/XHbAz6zKIY
Context & Ripple Effects
This meeting was set up the day before, when word broke that Jack Dorsey was left off the guest list despite Twitter's relevance to the president-elect — so the room's composition was already the story before anyone sat down. The follow-up coverage shows what happened inside: Nadella pressed immigration, Sandberg raised STEM, Bezos brought up China, and executives flagged the Trump children's presence as inappropriate.
The arc matters because this is the first data point in a repeating pattern: the same White House convened a similar executive roundtable two years later with Nadella and Pichai, and by 2024 Altman, Bezos, Cook, Dell, Nadella, Pichai, and Zuckerberg were publicly congratulating Trump on another victory. The open-door offer — call him or his team any time — is the mechanism that turned a one-off Tower meeting into a standing channel.
First-order effects
- Attendees gain a direct line to the incoming administration on trade and regulation, while Twitter — excluded from the room — has no equivalent access despite its platform's political salience.
- Peter Thiel's 'ahead of the curve' endorsement cements his role as the bridge between Silicon Valley and the transition team, giving his portfolio companies an implicit advocate inside the process.
Second-order effects
- Attendance becomes political currency: being in the room (or not, as with Dorsey) forces every major tech CEO to weigh engagement against the optics of legitimizing the administration, and rivals watch who shows up.
- The 'fair trade deals' framing puts China-exposed companies like Amazon and Apple on notice that their supply chains and market access are now negotiating chips, which is why Bezos raising China in the meeting reads as a direct response.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — summit in 2016, roundtable in 2018, industry-wide congratulations in 2024 — tech's posture toward Trump shifts from post-election resistance to institutionalized engagement, with personal access to the president substituting for formal policy channels.
- Trade policy becomes a lever the administration can apply selectively across the tech sector, rewarding engaged firms and leaving uninvited ones to lobby through intermediaries like Thiel.
The trend: Silicon Valley's relationship with Trump is evolving from election-season antagonism into a recurring, access-based dialogue that outlasts any single administration.