(White House)

Here are the Trump ties among the tech leaders who had dinner at the White House

Many of the attendees have donated to, vocally supported, or even worked for the president.

9/8/25 3:17PM

If an asteroid had hit the White House last Thursday night, the American tech industry would have practically vaporized. The glitzy dinner of tech leaders at the White House was a star-studded event, and an extremely high concentration of high-net-worth individuals.

But not everyone got an invitation, and there were several notable absences at the table, like former “First Buddy” Elon Musk, who says he was invited but couldn’t attend. And Jensen Huang, the leader of Nvidia — the world’s most valuable company — was nowhere to be found.

After cataloging the identities of all the dinner guests, we decided to dig a little deeper into what each guest might have done to get one of the exclusive invitations.

Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook and Sam Altman at the White House. — Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook, and Sam Altman at the White House (White House)

A few of the guests were part of President Trump’s administration, such as venture capitalist and podcaster turned “AI and crypto czar” David Sacks and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Others were in the orbit of Trump’s presidential campaign and fundraising team, like former campaign finance director Meredith O’Rourke and Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio.

All of the guests who got a chance to speak were heaping praise on Trump’s leadership on AI, but Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates used his brief comments to highlight his philanthropic work supporting vaccines and eliminating disease.

Here’s a breakdown of the attendees and why they may have made the cut. (See our compilation of the full list of attendees here.)

💰 Chamath Palihapitiya — Social Capital CEO. Helped raise millions for Trump’s 2024 campaign.
🕶️ Mark Zuckerberg — Meta CEO. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Trump once threatened Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered in last year’s election.
🇺🇸 Safra Catz — Oracle CEO. Served on Trump’s 2016 transition team.
🚀 David Limp — Blue Origin CEO. Blue Origin reached out to Trump to capitalize on his spat with Musk and position the rocket company as a viable SpaceX alternative.
🇺🇸 Mark Pincus — Zynga cofounder. Announced his vote for Trump in 2024, citing Trump’s support for Israel. Donated $97,519 to Trump’s inauguration.
💰 John Hering — Lookout cofounder. Donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
💰 Lisa Su — Advanced Micro Devices CEO. Agreed to pay a 15% cut on all MI308 AI chips to the Trump administration in exchange for lifting the ban on sales to China. Nvidia cut a similar deal for its H20 chips.
👁️ Shyam Sankar — Palantir CTO. Palantir was picked by the Trump administration to help amass data on Americans across government agencies.
💰 Sergey Brin — Google cofounder. Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
🏆 Tim Cook — Apple CEO. Personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, pledged a $600 billion investment from Apple in US manufacturing, and gifted Trump a golden bauble in the Oval Office.
💰 Sam Altman — OpenAI CEO. Personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and announced a $500 billion Stargate project at the White House in January 2025.
🇺🇸 Sanjay Mehrotra — Micron CEO. Pledged a $200 billion “onshoring” of advanced memory chips.
💰 Satya Nadella — Microsoft CEO. Microsoft donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
💰 Sundar Pichai — Google CEO. Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration.
🚀 Jared Isaacman — Shift4 CEO. Was nominated by Trump to head NASA, but was withdrawn during his spat with Isaacman’s ally, Musk. Donated $2 million to Trump’s inauguration.

Sources: OpenSecrets, Sherwood News research.

Rani Molla18h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

20h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla21h

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla22h

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan23h

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea