Trump Hosts Tech Titans at White House, Showcases AI and Investments

President Donald Trump welcomed a high-powered group of technology executives to the White House on Thursday, touting advances in artificial intelligence while pressing companies on the billions they are investing in the United States.

“This is taking our country to a new level,” Trump said at the center of a long table, surrounded by what he described as “high IQ people.”

The dinner, moved indoors from the Rose Garden due to rain, featured top names including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. Executives rattled off investment figures as Trump pressed them one by one: Zuckerberg and Cook cited $600 billion, Pichai $250 billion, and Nadella $80 billion annually. “Good. Very good,” Trump replied.

Notably absent was Elon Musk, once close to Trump but now estranged. In his place sat rivals and new allies, among them OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and Shift4 founder Jared Isaacman — whose earlier NASA nomination Trump himself had withdrawn.

The event followed the inaugural meeting of the White House’s Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force, chaired by First Lady Melania Trump. “The robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction,” she said, urging responsible oversight. She has launched a national AI contest for K–12 students and pushed legislation targeting AI-driven online exploitation.

Trump has embraced AI-generated memes on social media, even joking this week that he might “just blame AI” if something went wrong. Still, his courtship of tech leaders has stirred divisions in the GOP. Senator Josh Hawley on Thursday blasted “frontier AI systems” and urged strict government inspections, singling out Meta and ChatGPT.

For Trump, however, the evening was about power, money, and optics. As one political analyst noted: “It’s a two-way courtship — Trump thrives on the attention of billionaires, and the companies want to stay on his good side.”