Washington – US president-elect Donald Trump told a group of technology executives Wednesday that they should feel free to call him directly as they seek to continue innovating.
“We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation,” Trump told chief executives and other top officials from tech giants at the start of a technology summit at Trump Tower in New York.
The executives, including well-known chief executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Elon Musk of Tesla, were shown in media reports seated around a conference table.
“This is a truly amazing group of people,” Trump said. The statement was a departure from harsh comments Trump made during the campaign about some of the technology companies for various reasons, including moving their manufacturing out of the United States and holding profits in offshore bank accounts.
The president-elect went on to pledge that his administration will “be there for you,” telling the group, many of them billionaires like himself, “I’m here to help you folks do well.”
Seated next to vice president-elect Mike Pence, Trump added: “You’ll call my people, you’ll call me. It doesn’t make any difference. We have no formal chain of command around here.”
None of the business leaders spoke to reporters in the Trump Tower lobby as the made their way to the meeting. Reporters were allowed into the room initially, but were then ushered out.
The Trump transition team later issued a statement saying the topics discussed included creating jobs for American workers, trade and market access with China, cutting taxes, returning technology company profits to the United States and improving US cybersecurity.
The statement said the meeting was held “to begin a conversation and partnership in order to spark innovation and create more jobs in the US, particularly for working Americans.”
Trump’s children, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Junior, Eric Trump, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner also attended the meeting.
Trump invited the chief executives or top officials of Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Cisco, Facebook, Tesla, Google and Palantir Technologies. One company glaringly overlooked on the list of invitees was Twitter, a social media platform Trump frequently used during the campaign to communicate directly with millions of people who follow him.
A transition official was quoted in media reports as saying Twitter wasn’t invited “because they aren’t big enough.” But multiple news reports said it wasn’t included as retribution for refusing to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary.
Trump’s campaign wanted the emoji, which would have shown various depictions of small bags of money being given away or stolen, during the campaign. It would have been offered to users as a replacement for the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to several media outlets quoting an unidentified source familiar with the situation.
Among the other company leaders were Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Safra Catz of Oracle, Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies, Brian Krzanich of Intel, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Chuck Robbins of Cisco, Ginni Rometty of IBM and Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google.
Trump suggested reconvening the tech leaders again in the future, perhaps as frequently as every quarter, according to the transition team statement.
–dpa
