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An annotated photo of who attended the tech dinner at the White House.
(Photo illustration: Sherwood News; Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

An interactive who’s-who of the tech execs at Trump’s White House dinner

The White House invited a gaggle of top founders and tech executives for an intimate dinner at the White House.

A who’s-who of tech executives and AI power players sat side by side at a long table in the White House on Thursday evening to lather President Trump with praise for his leadership on AI.

Billed by White House spokesperson Davis Ingle as “the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world,” the exclusive dinner was packed with “the most brilliant people,” according to Trump, who said, “This is a high-IQ group.”

Proximity is power, and none of the tech figures were closer to Trump than Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Photos from the dinner showed the two laughing and chumming it up, a remarkable turn of fortune for Zuckerberg, who Trump once famously warned might “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered in the 2024 presidential election.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump at the White House (Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

Attendees included:

  • Dylan Field, Figma CEO

  • Sunny Madra, Groq president

  • Jason Chang, CSBio CEO

  • Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer

  • Nathalie Dompé

  • Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital CEO

  • David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto czar

  • Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO

  • President Trump

  • First Lady Melania Trump

  • Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder

  • Safra Catz, Oracle CEO

  • Gal Tirosh

  • Jamie Siminoff, Ring founder

  • David Limp, Blue Origin CEO

  • Mark Pincus, Zynga cofounder

  • John Hering, Lookout cofounder

  • Lisa Su, Advanced Micro Devices CEO

  • Meredith O’Rourke

  • Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff

  • Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO

  • Sergey Brin, Google cofounder

  • Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto

  • Tim Cook, Apple CEO

  • Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

  • Greg Brockman, OpenAI president

  • Anna Brockman

  • Tony Fabrizio

  • Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron CEO

  • Vivek Ranadivé, former TIBCO Software CEO and current CEO of Sacramento Kings

  • Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

  • Sundar Pichai, Google CEO

  • Jared Isaacman, Shift4 CEO

Notable absences

Perhaps more interesting than who was invited to the dinner was who didn’t attend.

Never one to hold a grudge, former “First Buddy” and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X that he was invited, but would send a representative. It’s unclear if the Musk/Trump beef is heating up again.

Also absent was a representative from the company that is powering all of the AI that everyone was gushing about and recently struck a remarkably unusual trade deal with the White House: Nvidia. CEO Jensen Huang was notably missing from the gathering, but maybe he prefers one-on-one dinners at Mar-a-lago.

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Georgia lawmakers introduce data center construction moratorium amid statewide pushback

More and more communities across the US are wrestling with the pros and cons of having a data center come to town. Georgia has become a hotspot of resistance to the data centers planned by Big Tech, according to a new report from The Guardian. The Atlanta metro area led the nation in data center construction in 2024.

Georgia state representatives introduced legislation that would place a one-year moratorium on data center construction in the state. Ten Georgia municipalities have already passed local bans on data centers.

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

Georgia state representatives introduced legislation that would place a one-year moratorium on data center construction in the state. Ten Georgia municipalities have already passed local bans on data centers.

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

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Corning soars after striking deal to sell up to $6 billion in optical infrastructure to Meta

Glass company Corning is soaring in early trading after announcing a $6 billion deal with Meta to provide its data centers with fiber-optic cable products. Thanks to a string of big tech deals — including partnerships with Broadcom and Apple — Corning’s stock is up about 100% over the past year.

A 175-year-old glass manufacturer, Corning is known for its Gorilla Glass, used in smartphone and laptop screens. It was known in the past for its iconic blue cornflower CorningWare ceramics, a consumer cookware business it spun off in the 1990s.

In an interview, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC that he thinks “next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers,” amid demand from tech giants including Google and Microsoft.

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Wedbush’s Dan Ives predicts Tesla FSD penetration will rise from 12% to above 50%, but doesn’t say how

Ahead of earnings Wednesday, a new note on Tesla from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives argues the company is on the cusp of a Robotaxi-driven transformation, with Full Self-Driving penetration rising above 50% and autonomy unlocking as much as $1 trillion in value — putting Tesla on a path to a $2 trillion to $3 trillion market cap over the coming year.

The issue isn’t the optimism; it’s the absence of mechanics. FSD penetration across Tesla’s global fleet currently sits in the low teens. The note doesn’t explain how Tesla bridges that gap — whether through pricing changes, bundling, or a behavioral shift among mass-market buyers. Tesla is ending the option to buy FSD outright in favor of subscriptions, but that alone isn’t going to push adoption from roughly 12% to 50%.

Ives treats Teslas Robotaxi progress as inevitable rather than conditional. The removal of safety drivers in Austin — which for now is isolated to two or three vehicles and involves using an extra car to follow the Robotaxi — is framed as a tipping point. But there’s little discussion of scaling risks, regulation, real-world performance data, or actual demand. Ives only says President Trump will likely issue an executive order on autonomous rules and regulatory hurdles will effectively disappear — with the implication that FSD adoption would accelerate rapidly.

Even near-term fundamentals are stretched to support the narrative. Tesla didn’t beat Q4 delivery expectations, though Ives says it did, having previously cited whisper numbers rather than the analyst consensus. That claim is then used to clear the runway for a valuation argument focused almost entirely on future autonomy.

In the end, this is less an earnings preview note than a statement of belief: autonomy works; adoption follows; Tesla wins at scale.

That story may eventually prove right — but for now, it’s an assertion that outstrips the evidence.

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