NEW YORK/WASHINGTON--President-elect Donald Trump and some of Silicon Valley's most powerful executives met at his Manhattan tower on Wednesday, a summit convened to smooth over frictions after both sides made no secret of their disdain for each other during the election campaign.
The meeting focused chiefly on economic issues, including job creation, lowering taxes and trade dynamics with China, while largely skirting the many disagreements the tech industry has with Trump on matters ranging from immigration to digital privacy, according to a Trump transition team statement. Trump proposed reconvening with the tech leaders as often as every quarter, the statement said.
Three of Trump's adult children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, sat at the head of a large rectangular table as the meeting began in a conference room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower. Their attendance may fuel further concern about potential conflicts of interests for Trump, who has said he would hand over control of his business empire to his children while he occupies the White House.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence was also there. Guests sat in front of paper name plates and bottles of water sporting the Trump brand logo.
The meeting between tech luminaries, including Apple Inc's Tim Cook, Facebook Inc's Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla Motors Inc's Elon Musk, took place as Trump has alarmed some U.S. corporations with his rhetoric challenging long-established policy toward China, a main market for Silicon Valley.
A senior Chinese state planning official told the China Daily newspaper Wednesday that Beijing could slap a penalty on a U.S. automaker for monopolistic behaviour, a warning delivered days after Trump questioned acknowledging Taiwan as part of "one China." The official did not identify the automaker.
"There's nobody like the people in this room, and anything we can do to help this go along we're going to do that for you," Trump told the executives in the presence of reporters. "You call my people, you call me, it doesn't make any difference. We have no formal chain of command."
Trump added: "We're going to make fair trade deals. We're going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders."
Other participants included Alphabet Inc's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, Microsoft Corp's Satya Nadella, and Ginni Rometty from IBM. Twitter was not invited to the meeting because it was too small, a transition spokesman told Reuters.
Cook and Musk joined Trump for separate meetings after the other technology executives leave, according to a spokesman for Trump's transition team.
Bezos said in a statement the meeting was "very productive" and that he "shared the view that the administration should make innovation one of its key pillars, which would create a huge number of jobs across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech - agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing -everywhere."
Trump clashed with Silicon Valley on several issues during the election campaign, including immigration, government surveillance and encryption, and his surprise victory last month alarmed many companies that feared he might follow through on his pledges. He has said that many tech companies are overvalued by investors.
"You look at some of these tech stocks that are so, so weak as a concept and a company and they're selling for so much money," he told Reuters in an interview in May.
