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.

9/5/25 3:24PM

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.

GettyImages-2233060790 — 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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Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

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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.

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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.

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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

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

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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