Technology industry leaders including Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Amazon. com's Jeff Bezos have met with US president-elect Donald Trump, seeking to persuade Trump – whose presidential bid many of them opposed – to avoid policies they believe would hurt their companies.
“I’m here to help you folks do well,” Trump told the executives.
Trump has a prickly relationship with the industry.
He differs with many tech chief executives on immigration, internet security and regulation and on government investment.
This summer, more than 140 tech industry executives published an open letter denouncing his candidacy and declaring that he “would be a disaster for innovation.”
The meeting included Alphabet’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Intel’s Brian Krzanich, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins, Apple’s Tim Cook, Palantir Technologies’ Alex Karp and IBM’s Ginni Rometty.
Rometty also serves on a panel of chief executives advising Trump on business and economic matters. Bezos is Amazon’s chief executive; Sandberg is Facebook’s chief operating officer.
Space considerations
Bezos later issued a statement that said he found the meeting “very productive”.
“I 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,” he said.
Some tech companies were also notable for their absence.
Twitter, the president-elect’s medium of choice for communication, was not invited. Twitter declined to comment on why it was not invited.
Sean Spicer, a spokesman for Trump, said Twitter had been left out of the meeting because of space considerations in a gathering that many other technology executives were “dying to get into”.
– Agencies
