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Highlights from Trump’s meeting with Silicon Valley

You’ve probably heard of the tech summit heard ’round the world by now.

United States President-elect Donald Trump gathered the titans of the tech industry at Trump Tower in New York this week – and we have a summary of the day’s events.

The summit marks the first time Trump is meeting with any collective group from a single industry. Considering Trump has been at odds with the tech industry throughout most of his campaign, this is being seen as the first step Trump is making to reconcile with Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are thought to have been instrumental in putting this meeting together.

While topics such as trade, corporate tax reform, and immigration may have arisen at the meeting, the focus of the summit was jobs.

Who Attended

Trump and his advisers met with 13 of the industry’s most prominent executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, CEO of Google‘s parent company Alphabet, Larry Page, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has been personally criticized by Trump, was in attendance as well.

Notably absent from the summit are Fortune 500 tech companies such as HPE, HP Inc., Yahoo, Dell EMC, and most glaringly, Twitter.

According to Reuters, the official word out of the Trump camp is that Twitter “wasn’t invited because they aren’t big enough.” Twitter’s market cap of $13.85 billion would make it the smallest company in attendance. However, multiple media source’s report that the decision to keep Twitter out could stem from Trump’s displeasure with the company, which rejected an advertising deal with his campaign in October that would have shown an emoji next to the hashtag ‘#CrookedHillary’.

The meeting

When it comes to the actual summit itself, most of these tech companies, as well as Trump, have kept silent. Fortunately, the press was allowed in the room for the first four minutes and were able to capture the opening remarks. We’ve pulled some of the highlights from the opening remarks, but you can view the full transcript published by The Wall Street Journal here.

The on-the-record discussion ended with Trump’s remarks. Here are the highlights:

Besides a statement from Bezos who left the meeting feeling that it was “very productive”, no one on either side of the discussion has gone on the record. However, Recode was able to publish a broad recap of the events based on numerous sources “close to the executives involved.” Obviously, those sources remain unnamed.

A big takeaway was the commotion around Trump involving his three oldest children – an action those executives took to be “inappropriate on a number of levels,” saying “they took up three seats that should have gone to key tech people.”

Overall, Bezos’ statement that the meeting was very productive seems to be accurate. Nadella spoke about the importance of immigration and how the government can help in areas like H-1B visas, something Trump responded favorably too. Both Cook and Sandberg spoke strongly about science, technology engineering, and math (STEM) education, a topic that both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have spoken heavily about, but one that Trump hasn’t publicly formed an opinion on.

The aftermath

Unlike the earlier meeting Trump held with members of the media, the fallout here has been quiet, with one source saying that “the meeting was weird, but not as awkward as it could have been,” and another reporting that Trump was in fact “reasonable and fair the whole time.”

After the initial meeting, Trump did meet one-on-one with both Cook and Musk, about what is anyone’s guess, although Musk, alongside Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, has been named to Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum. Musk, who has gone on record saying that Trump was “not the right guy” for the Oval office, appears to have changed his tune. The three join a growing list of executives in the Forum, including JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and IBM CEO Ginny Rometty.

On Twitter, the Trump camp was ecstatic about the event, with reports indicating that Trump suggested the group reconvene for future summits like this one as often as once a quarter.

Silicon Valley, on the other hand, may not be as high on that possibility – at least in a public manner, especially with the sentiment that the “[executives] definitely gave up a little stature now for possible benefit later” following those who attended.

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