President Donald Trump welcomed some of the world’s most powerful technology leaders to the White House on Thursday evening for a high-profile dinner, notably excluding Elon Musk from the guest list. The event, staged on the recently remodelled Rose Garden patio, featured a setup reminiscent of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, complete with umbrellas, tables, and chairs designed to create an exclusive club-like atmosphere. White House spokesman Davis Ingle described the new venue as “the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world.”
Among the prominent attendees were Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI leaders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, and Blue Origin CEO David Limp. Other notable names included Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, Palantir executive Shyam Sankar, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadivé, and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman. The gathering highlighted Trump’s continued push to engage with business leaders at the highest level as he seeks to shape U.S. technology and innovation policy.
The dinner followed the inaugural meeting of the White House’s Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force, chaired by First Lady Melania Trump. In her remarks, she likened the development of artificial intelligence to raising children, stressing the need for empowerment balanced with careful guidance. The task force aims to design AI-focused education programs for young Americans, with several dinner guests expected to contribute ideas and resources to these initiatives.
Elon Musk’s absence drew considerable attention, underscoring his growing rift with Trump. Once seen as a close ally, Musk had been appointed to head the Department of Government Efficiency but broke with the administration earlier this year. Tensions escalated further when Trump revoked the NASA nomination of Musk’s associate, Jared Isaacman—ironically, Isaacman still made the dinner guest list despite Trump later dismissing him as “totally a Democrat.” Musk’s exclusion signals a clear cooling of relations between the Tesla and SpaceX chief and the president.
The event, first reported by The Hill, has been viewed as both a showcase of Trump’s influence over the technology sector and a strategic effort to rally industry leaders behind his administration’s AI agenda. While the absence of Musk dominated headlines, the presence of nearly every other Silicon Valley powerhouse reinforced the White House’s message: under Trump’s leadership, the Rose Garden has become a stage for America’s most consequential conversations about the future of technology, power, and education.
