President Donald Trump will host a high-powered list of tech CEOs for a dinner at the White House on Thursday night.
The guest list is set to include Microsoft cofounder 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.
One notable absence from the guest list is Elon Musk, once a close ally of Trump, whom the Republican president tasked with running the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had a public breakup with Trump earlier this year.
The dinner will be held in the Rose Garden, where Trump recently paved over the grassy lawn and set up tables, chairs and umbrellas that look strikingly similar to the outdoor setup at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
“The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “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.”
The event will follow a meeting of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which first lady Melania Trump will chair.
“During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance,” she said in a statement. “We are living in a moment of wonder, and it is our responsibility to prepare America’s children.”
At least some of the attendees at the president’s Thursday’s dinner are expected to participate in the task force meeting, which aims to develop AI education for American youths.
The White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner is also set to include Google founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive, Palantir executive Shyam Sankar, Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
Isaacman 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.”
The dinner was first reported Wednesday by The Hill.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tech-ceos-white-house-rose-garden-e234e719d96d299d2f670037f9505a9f
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer met privately in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump to make a case he did not want to hear: the automotive industry he said he wants to save were being hurt by his tariffs.
The Democrat came with a slide deck to make her points in a visual presentation. Just getting the meeting Tuesday with the Republican president was an achievement for someone viewed as a contender for her party’s White House nomination in 2028.
Whitmer’s strategy for dealing with Trump highlights the conundrum for her and other Democratic leaders as they try to protect the interests of their states while voicing their opposition to his agenda. It’s a dynamic that Whitmer has navigated much differently from many other Democratic governors.
The fact that Whitmer had “an opening to make direct appeals” in private to Trump was unique in this political moment, said Matt Grossman, a Michigan State University politics professor.
It was her third meeting with Trump at the White House since he took office in January. This one, however, was far less public than the time in April when Whitmer was unwittingly part of an impromptu news conference that embarrassed her so much she covered her face with a folder.
On Tuesday, she told the president that the economic damage from the tariffs could be severe in Michigan, a state that helped deliver him the White House in 2024. Whitmer also brought up federal support for recovery efforts after an ice storm and sought to delay changes to Medicaid.
Trump offered no specific commitments, according to people familiar with the private conversation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity to describe it.
Whitmer is hardly the only one sounding the warning of the potentially damaging consequences, including factory job losses, lower profits and coming price increases, of the import taxes that Trump has said will be the economic salvation for American manufacturing.
The toy market was worth $114.4 billion in 2024, according to a report from Research and Markets, and it’s forecasted to nearly double by 2034, reaching $203.1 billion.
However, the tariffs pose a roadblock to that plan. The reason is simple: nearly 80% of toys imported into the United States come from China. That leaves toymakers with some difficult options: absorb the costs of the imports, or pass them on to the consumer.
MGA Entertainment is the largest privately held toy manufacturer in the U.S. and is the brand behind many of the popular toys you see on store shelves, including Bratz, L.O.L. Surprise, and Little Tikes. But thanks to the tariffs, CEO Issac Larian is facing some hard decisions.
“Frankly, if these tariffs do not go away, we have no choice but to do layoffs,” he said in an interview with Retail Dive.
Large toy companies are being affected as well. Mattel announced in March that it would lay off about 35% of its manufacturing workforce.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tariffs-will-devastate-this-entire-industry/ar-AA1EfMvd
