President-elect Donald Trump has met with Silicon Valley’s biggest players, and according to The New York Times, it wasn’t the ritual humiliation some had predicted it would be. While Trump allegedly began his previous meeting with TV executives by telling CNN’s Jeff Zucker that “I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,” the president-elect was clearly wearing kid gloves when handling around $3 trillion worth of tech royalty.
“This is a truly amazing group of people,” he began before flattering the executives that had made the journey to Trump Tower by telling them that there is nobody like them in the world. “Anything we can do to help this go along, and we’re going to be there for you… you’ll call my people, you’ll call me – it doesn’t make any difference, we have no formal chain of command here. We’re going to do fair trade deals, we’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade.”
Things apparently kept going positively in the 90-minute meeting that followed, after the journalists were kicked out, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stating that he found the meeting to be “very productive”. The New York Times quotes an unnamed source from the Trump transition team who outlined the points of discussion as “vocational education and the need for more of it, the promise and peril of trade with China and immigration”. In the case of the latter, Trump wants “smart and talented people,” apparently.
In short, the campaigning Trump – who promised Amazon was going to have antitrust problems, and that Apple was going to have to start making its gadgets in the United States – wasn’t at home. Or he wasn’t there on the day, in any case: Politico claims that the grudge-holding Trump was still there under the surface, and had not invited Twitter’s Jack Dorsey because the social network has blocked a “#CrookedHillary” emoji from the site, despite the Trump campaign ploughing $5 million worth of advertising spend into Twitter’s coffers.
The official Trump team version of events is that the company simply isn’t big enough, and there wasn’t space around the table for everyone. To be fair, that’s an equally plausible defence despite Trump’s prolific use of the site. As I mentioned earlier, the combined value of the companies represented at the table is over $3 trillion. Here’s figures from Yahoo Finance and the Wall Street Journal helped our friends at Statista come up with the magic number:
With experts speculating Twitter’s worth somewhere between one and 20 billion dollars, they would comfortably be the smallest company at the table (SpaceX and Tesla were both represented by Elon Musk). Donald Trump, for his part, is estimated to be worth around $3.7 billion, according to Forbes, but that was before he won the keys to the White House…
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