President-elect Donald Trump has called upon the leaders of the tech industry to join him for a sit down to discuss the industry's role in his presidency. One tech leader was conspicuously missing.
The meeting held on Dec. 14 saw some of the biggest personalities in technology join Trump at his famous Trump Tower located in New York City. Apple's Tim Cook, Elon Musk of Tesla, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Eric Schmidt also of Alphabet, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, among others.
Absent from the meeting was Jack Dorsey of Twitter. The CEO of the social networking service was not invited and many speculated that his refusal to create the emoji for the CrookedHillary hashtag is the reason for his exclusion.
During the campaign period, Trump's campaign team was supposed to pay Twitter to have an emoji created that may be used when someone tweets the #CrookedHillary phrase. The emoji was a picture of "small bags of money being given away or stolen". Even with $5 million on the table, Dorsey blocked the deal.
According to a Fortune report, the president-elect's camp claims the reason why Dorsey was left out was because Twitter is a "small company". Twitter has a market capitalization of $13.85 billion.
The media first got wind of the summit after invitations were sent out by a trio of Trump's closest allies in the campaign, manager Reince Priebus, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and PayPal co-founder turned presidential tech adviser Peter Thiel.
It must be remembered that Trump was a staunch critic of Silicon Valley, particularly a number of tech companies. He even went on record to accuse Apple and Amazon of dodging taxes and negatively affecting employment by hiring overseas workers. He also mentioned that he will veto any merger such as that of AT&T and Time Warner.
The feeling is actually mutual as many of the tech leaders have voiced their opposition on a Trump presidency. Bezos, in fact, tweeted that he will gladly send Trump to space onboard the Blue Origin rocket. Apple, meanwhile, declined support for the 2016 Republican National Convention because of Trump's controversial comments on immigrants and other groups.
At the meeting, Trump assured everyone in the meeting that he's "here to help you folks do well". The meeting progressed to discuss policies regarding corporate tax rates, job creations and economic growth, in general.
