US President Donald Trump is hosting a high-powered list of tech CEOs for a dinner at the White House on Thursday night, with at least five Indian-origin moguls on the list.
The Indian-origin CEOs attending the Rose Garden event include Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Micron’s Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive, and Palantir executive Shyam Sankar.
Apart from the Indian-origin names, the extensive guest list has Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a dozen other executives from the biggest artificial intelligence and tech firms, according to the White House.
Google founder Sergey Brin, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang, and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman will also be in attendance.
The dinner will be held in the White House’s Rose Garden, which was recently redecorated to set up tables, chairs and umbrellas that look strikingly similar to the outdoor setup at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
“The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world. The President looks forward to welcoming top business, political, and tech leaders for this dinner and the many dinners to come on the new, beautiful Rose Garden patio,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement.
The dinner will follow a meeting of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which aims to develop AI education for American youth. First lady Melania Trump will head the task force meeting, which is expected to involve at least some of the dinner guest list.
Elon Musk absent, Jared Isaacman to attend Donald Trump’s dinner
One notable absence from the guest list of Donald Trump’s dinner with tech CEOs is Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The richest man on Earth was once a close ally of the Republican leader and was tasked with running the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk had a public break with Trump in late May, reportedly over the cancellation of Jared Isaacman’s nomination as the NASA chief, among other things.
Surprisingly, the White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner is set to include Isaacman. He was an associate of Musk, whom Trump nominated to lead NASA, only to revoke the nomination around the time of his breakup with Musk. Trump cited the revocation of the nomination as one of the reasons Musk was upset with him and called Isaacman “totally a Democrat.”
