(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 2:17PM

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.

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“Given that there have been over 1,000 AI laws proposed at the state level, this was a necessary move by the Trump Administration to keep the US out in front for the AI Revolution over China,” Ives wrote, adding that state-by-state regulation “would have crushed US AI startup culture.” The presidential order would withhold federal funds from states that put in place onerous AI regulations.

This morning, Whitehouse AI adviser Sriram Krishnan said in a CNBC interview that he’d be working with Congress on a single national framework for AI.

Despite Ives’ rosy read-through on the order, with the exception of Nvidia, which jumped on a report of boosted Chinese demand, many AI stocks are in the red early today. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF is down nearly 1% premarket, as the AI trade struggles thanks to underwhelming earnings results from Oracle earlier this week.

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“Fortnite” maker Epic Games notched two wins Thursday in its drawn-out battle against Big Tech’s app stores. “Fortnite” returned to the Google Play app store in the US, Reuters reports, as Epic continues working with Google to secure court approval for their settlement.

Meanwhile, a US appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple in Epic’s antitrust case, calling parts of the order overly broad, but upheld the contempt finding and left a sweeping injunction in place — keeping pressure on Apple to allow developers to steer users to outside payment options and reduce its tight control over how apps can communicate and monetize on iOS.

So many reasons to drop in this month... and now we're on Google Play in the U.S. too!

Android: https://t.co/Z6pkYqYsRI
iPhone: https://t.co/JNpTVneGMN
PC: https://t.co/CPsjp3XNdo pic.twitter.com/TV9b1ZlqfJ
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A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.

NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.

In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”