Trump gathers Silicon Valley's biggest bosses

[superbeets]

[h=1]'Right now everybody in this room has to like me - at least a little bit': Trump gathers Silicon Valley's biggest bosses for tech roundtable and praises them as 'amazing' - then takes credit for their stock prices soaring[/h]

• Meeting with president-elect comes after much of tech industry fiercely opposed his election
• Tim Cook and Elon Musk are in attendance- but Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is staying away and sending Sheryl Sandberg instead
• IBM announced massive job creation scheme in America before meeting

By REUTERS and NIKKI SCHWAB, U.S. POLITICAL REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 15:56, 14 December 2016 | UPDATED: 20:12, 14 December 2016

 

[superbeets]

Donald Trump gathered Silicon Valley executives together for a roundtable meeting, in an attempt to smooth over frictions after a contentious presidential campaign.
The biggest names in attendance were Apple's Tim Cook – who publicly supported Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton – and Tesla founder Elon Musk, who would meet Trump separately after the roundtable.
He called the group 'amazing' and then boasted about the stock market 'bounce' that followed his election.
'So right now everybody in this room has to like me – at least a little bit – but we're going to try and have that bounce continue,' Trump pledged.

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Donald Trump (left) thanked his one Silicon Valley backer, Peter Thiel (right), who brought a number of tech titans to Trump Tower today

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The president-elect's children: Donald Jr. (left), Ivanka (middle) and Eric Trump (right) sat through the meeting today with Silicon Valley bigwigs

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Donald Trump entertained a number of Silicon Valley CEO's and bosses including Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg

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Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg (left) attended a meeting for Silicon Valley executives alongside Vice President-elect Mike Pence (center) and Donald Trump (right)

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First arrival: Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle, was the first of the tech giant bosses to arrive at Trump Tower

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Talks: Catz said she hoped Trump would move on tax code reform, reducing regulation and negotiating better trade deals

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Amazon.com's CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, arrived for a meeting with Donald Trump today at Trump Tower

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Amazon and Washington Post head Jeff Bezos was the second tech titan to arrive today for a meeting between team Trump and Silicon Valley

Trump said the most important thing was 'we want you to keep going with the incredible innovation.'
'There's nobody like you in the world, in the world. There's nobody like the people in this room,' the president-elect told the titans, which also included Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Alphabet's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.
Trump pledged to be there for Silicon Valley.
'And you'll call my people, you'll call me. It doesn't make any difference,' Trump continued. 'We have no formal chain of command over here.'
Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle, was first to arrive at Trump Tower - after issuing a statement setting out what she and in all likelihood other executives will ask for.
'If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation, and negotiate better trade deals, the U.S. technology community will be stronger and more competitive than ever,' Catz said in a statement.
Bezos was the second to arrive and didn't speak to reporters on his way in.He is also the owner of the Washington Post, one of the many media companies Trump took issue with throughout his campaign.
Soon after Palantier's Alex Karp and Intel's Brian Krzanich arrived.
'I know the president-elect is looking forward to welcoming some of the leading tech CEOs in American to Trump Tower to talk about how we can grow jobs in high-tech all across the country,' said Vice President-elect Mike Pence, briefly talking to reporters today at Trump Tower.
A flurry of tech heads soon arrived at the tower including Musk, Cisco's Chuck Robbins, IBM's Ginni Rometty and Saya Nadella of Microsoft.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid the president-elect a visit yesterday at Trump Tower.
Other attendees, including Facebook's Sandberg, will get a chance to promote their priorities like strong encryption and liability protections from content shared by their users.
Sandberg arrived alongside Page and Schmidt, now of Alphabet, Google's parent company.
The meeting was billed as an introductory session, said four sources briefed on the talks, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting.
Reporters were briefly led into the room, in which Trump hosted the tech titans, along with his three adult kids, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr.
Trump began the meeting by thanking Peter Thiel, the president-elect's only prominent supporter from Silicon Valley.
'He got about just the biggest applause at the Republican National Convention,' Trump said. 'He's ahead of the curve. And I want to thank you. You're a very special guy,' Trump added, grabbing the hand of Thiel, who was sitting on his left-hand side.
Trump then addressed the full group.
'I want to add that I'm here to help you folks do well,' Trump said. 'You're doing well right now and I'm very honored by the bounce.'
Trump was likely referring to the post-election bounce on the stock market.
'They're all talking about the bounce,' he repeated.
'We're going to make it a lot easier for you to trade,' Trump added.
The reporters in the room were then escorted out.
The CEOs of Airbnb and Uber were invited but are not attending. Uber's Travis Kalanick will instead be traveling in India all week, according to a person familiar with his plans.

 

[superbeets]

Trump clashed with Silicon Valley on several issues during the campaign, including immigration, government surveillance and encryption, and his surprise victory last month alarmed many companies that feared he might follow through on his pledges.
He has said that many tech companies are overvalued by investors.
'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,' he told Reuters in an interview in May.
Those concerns have not been assuaged in recent weeks as Trump has threatened to upset trade relationships with China, a key market for U.S. tech companies, and appoint officials who favor expanded surveillance programs.
'For some of the companies, there was some hesitation about whether to attend' because of sharp political and personal differences with Trump, one tech industry source said.
Nearly 600 employees of technology companies pledged in an open letter on Tuesday to refuse to help Trump's administration build a data registry to track people based on their religion or assist in mass deportations.
Silicon Valley enjoyed a warm rapport with President Barack Obama and heavily supported Democrat Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign.

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Invitation: Trump's move to reach out to Silicon Valley also saw Elon Musk and Uber's Travis Kalanick appointed to his business advisory council

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Special meeting: Tesla's Elon Musk (left) and Apple's Tim Cook (right) will be sitting down with the president-elect for a special meeting after the roundtable

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Attending: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) and IBM CEO Ginny Rometty (right) will be present for the Trump Tower summit

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Trump encounter: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, was a dyed in the wool Clinton supporter who was in Cuba on Monday

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Not Trump fans: Google's Larry Page is also said to have been an opponent

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is expected to attend Donald Trump's tech summit today. Yesterday his company's co-founder, Bill Gates, had a meeting with the president-elect

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Not attending: Travis Kalanick, of Uber, is in India but was named to Trump's business advisory panel

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Tech mogul Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who spoke at the GOP convention, helped organize the Silicon Valley get-together

Schmidt was photographed on election night at Clinton headquarters wearing a staff badge, and Musk said in interviews before the election that Trump's character reflected poorly on the United States.
Despite those tensions, Trump named Musk to a business advisory council that will give private-sector input to Trump after he takes office on Jan. 20.
Uber's Kalanick was also appointed to the council.
From the employees of the 10 largest Fortune 500 tech companies, Trump raised just $179,400 from 982 campaign donors who contributed more than $200.
Clinton raised $4.4 million from the employees of the same companies, with more than 20,400 donations, a Reuters review of contribution data found.
Trump publicly bashed the industry during the campaign. He urged his supporters to boycott Apple products over the company's refusal to help the FBI unlock an iPhone associated with last year's San Bernardino, California, shootings, threatened antitrust action against Amazon and demanded that tech companies build their products in the United States.
Trump has also been an opponent of the Obama administration's net neutrality rules barring internet service providers from obstructing or slowing consumer access to web content.
Two advisers to his Federal Communications Commission transition team are opponents of the rules, as are the two Republicans on the FCC.
Last week, the two Republicans on the panel urged a quick reversal of many Obama policies and one, Commissioner Ajit Pai, said he believed that net neutrality's 'days are numbered.'
[h=3]IBM'S 25,000 HOMELAND JOBS[/h]The head of IBM is getting in good with President-elect Donald Trump with a pledge to hire 25,000 Americans during his administration in advance of a tech summit at Trump Tower on Wednesday.
'At IBM alone, we have thousands of open positions at any given moment, and we intend to hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States, 6,000 of those in 2017,' write CEO Ginni Rometty in USA Today.
'IBM will also invest $1 billion in training and development of our U.S. employees in the next four years.'
She made a pitch for 'new collar' jobs, adding, 'We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving – and that is also why so many of these jobs remain hard to fill.'
'As industries from manufacturing to agriculture are reshaped by data science and cloud computing, jobs are being created that demand new skills – which in turn requires new approaches to education, training and recruiting.'

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[KingofNicotine]

The Twitter CEO wasn't invited because they refused to have a Crooked Hillary emoji. I love Trump but he can't hold grudges over stupid stuff like that.

 

[PatsFan1283]

That's gotta be the most $ that has been in a room at the same time together, atleast in modern times.

Not sure if the robber barons had weekly card games.


If you aren't worth atleast a billion you might be fetching coffee with that crew.

 

[Greenbacks]

Twitter was bounced from today's tech meeting with Trump for refusing a "Crooked Hillary" emoji during the campaign.

When executives of some of the country’s biggest tech companies crowded around a conference table in Trump Tower to meet with the President-Elect Wednesday, one face was curiously absent. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hadn’t been invited to the meeting — and a new Politico report claims that the snub was payback for Twitter refusing to run “Crooked Hillary” emoji during the election campaign.
Trump had invited executives from Google/ Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Palantir, Tesla and others to talk tech Wednesday. Photos posted from the meeting showed Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and other high-profile executives in attendance.
Also present were controversial ****** co-founder Peter Thiel, Donald Trump’s children Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump jr. as well as RNC strategist Sean Spicer.
Reports surfaced earlier this week that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hadn’t been invited, and Spicer had told CNN earlier Wednesday that Dorsey could join the group for follow-up meetings. Trump himself joked at the beginning of the meeting that Thiel had told him not to invite certain companies because they weren’t big enough.

A Trump transition team spokesperson later told Reuters that this was the only reason Twitter wasn’t at the table.
However, Politico suggested that the snub was a calculated response to an advertising dispute between Trump’s election campaign and Twitter. Trump’s campaign had committed to spending at least $5 million on Twitter ads during the campaign, and also wanted to introduce a custom “Crooked Hillary” emoji as part of that campaign.
The emoji, which played on unproven accusations of financial improprieties at the Clinton Foundation, was initially supposed to be a hand holding a bag of money. After discussions with Twitter’s staff, the campaign instead settled on a stick figure running away with a bag of money.
Twitter eventually killed both emoji as well as any further emoji proposed by the campaign, and Trump campaign digital advertising director Gary Coby alleged in a blog post last month that this decision was driven by a direct intervention from Twitter’s leadership.
Ironically, Trump used the opening of the meeting to promise the tech industry a better working relationship. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” he said, according to reports.

 

[PatsFan1283]

Ehh, not every CEO needs to be in that meeting.

Twitter is just a communication platform. Doesnt really have the operations the others do.

 

[ScottL]

The innovators, the future of mankind, the protectors of America's edge are not in Wash DC or even NYC. America's edge, and our ability to discover great things and live longer and healthier lives are in the hands of the our experts in technology, and our scientists and researchers at our large drug companies. It's funny to me how both Hillary and Trump have whined about drug prices. Ironically, Hillary's inability to use technology brought her down.