An annotated photo of who attended the tech dinner at the White House.

(Photo illustration: Sherwood News; Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

An interactive who’s-who of the tech execs at Trump’s White House dinner

The White House invited a gaggle of top founders and tech executives for an intimate dinner at the White House.

9/5/25 3:24PM

A who’s-who of tech executives and AI power players sat side by side at a long table in the White House on Thursday evening to lather President Trump with praise for his leadership on AI.

Billed by White House spokesperson Davis Ingle as “the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world,” the exclusive dinner was packed with “the most brilliant people,” according to Trump, who said, “This is a high-IQ group.”

Proximity is power, and none of the tech figures were closer to Trump than Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Photos from the dinner showed the two laughing and chumming it up, a remarkable turn of fortune for Zuckerberg, who Trump once famously warned might “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered in the 2024 presidential election.

GettyImages-2233060790 — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump at the White House (Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

Attendees included:

Dylan Field, Figma CEO
Sunny Madra, Groq president
Jason Chang, CSBio CEO
Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer
Nathalie Dompé
Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital CEO
David Sacks, the White House’s “AI and crypto czar”
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO
President Trump
First Lady Melania Trump
Bill Gates, Microsoft cofounder
Safra Catz, Oracle CEO
Gal Tirosh
Jamie Siminoff, Ring founder
David Limp, Blue Origin CEO
Mark Pincus, Zynga cofounder
John Hering, Lookout cofounder
Lisa Su, Advanced Micro Devices CEO
Meredith O’Rourke
Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff
Shyam Sankar, Palantir CTO
Sergey Brin, Google cofounder
Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto
Tim Cook, Apple CEO
Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO
Greg Brockman, OpenAI president
Anna Brockman
Tony Fabrizio
Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron CEO
Vivek Ranadivé, former TIBCO Software CEO and current CEO of Sacramento Kings
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO
Sundar Pichai, Google CEO
Jared Isaacman, Shift4 CEO

Notable absences

Perhaps more interesting than who was invited to the dinner was who didn’t attend.

Never one to hold a grudge, former “First Buddy” and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X that he was invited, but would send a representative. It’s unclear if the Musk/Trump beef is heating up again.

Also absent was a representative from the company that is powering all of the AI that everyone was gushing about and recently struck a remarkably unusual trade deal with the White House: Nvidia. CEO Jensen Huang was notably missing from the gathering, but maybe he prefers one-on-one dinners at Mar-a-lago.

Rani Molla2h

Musk blurs the boundaries of his companies even more with joint xAI-Tesla AI agent project

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that Tesla and xAI, which is part of SpaceX, would work on a joint AI agent project called “Macrohard,” also referred to as “Digital Optimus,” as part of Tesla’s $2 billion investment in xAI. The collaboration would pair Grok with what Musk described as a real-time computer-controlling AI agent running on Tesla hardware.

In his post, Musk said Grok would serve as the higher-level “System 2” reasoning layer, directing “Digital Optimus,” a faster “System 1” system that processes the last five seconds of screen video and keyboard and mouse inputs to take action. He claimed the system would run inexpensively on Tesla’s low-cost AI4 chip alongside more expensive Nvidia chips at xAI, and suggested it could, “in principle,” emulate the function of entire companies. “No other company can yet do this,” he said.

Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint xAI-Tesla project, coming as part of Tesla’s investment agreement with xAI.

Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2026

Business Insider reported earlier Wednesday that Tesla was taking up the AI agent mantle as xAI’s similar project stalled, but Musk’s post suggests the initiatives are more intertwined than previously understood.

The collaboration marks the latest example of Musk’s companies working closely together, further blurring the lines between Tesla and the recently merged SpaceX–xAI entity.

Rani Molla5h

Meta doubles down on custom inference chips after reportedly scrapping training chip

Meta said today that it’s expanding its custom silicon development to include four new generations of Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chips. The announcement comes just weeks after The Information reported that the social media company had scrapped its most advanced AI training chip, dubbed Olympus, after facing design challenges. In the meantime, it signed outside chip deals with Nvidiaand Advanced Micro Devices.

Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger.

“Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.”

The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia:

“MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.”

Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models.

Expanding Meta’s Custom Silicon to Power Our AI Workloads

Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger.

“Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.”

The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia:

“MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.”

Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models.

Rani Molla5h

Google completes acquisition of Wiz — its biggest ever

Today Google said it has completed its $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity startup Wiz, the largest deal in the company’s history.

“This acquisition is an investment by Google Cloud to improve cloud security and enable organizations to build fast and securely across any cloud or AI platform,” the company wrote in the press release.

The companies agreed to the all-cash purchase last year, after quite a bit of back-and-forth.

Alphabet updated acquisitions chart — Sherwood News

Google Completes Acquisition of Wiz

David Crowther, Claire Yubin Oh

Perp walk

Perplexity has been left behind in the AI wars

Once touted as a potential Google killer, the AI search engine’s traffic has been flat over the last year, while peers like Claude have surged ahead.

Amazon Wins Suit Against Perplexity, Blocking AI Shopping Agent

Rani Molla7h

Uber jumps on news it’s partnering with Amazon’s Zoox in Las Vegas and Los Angeles

Uber jumped premarket after announcing it will offer rides in Amazon-owned Zoox autonomous vehicles on its platform in Las Vegas later this summer and Los Angeles in the middle of next year, as part of a multiyear agreement. Zoox is currently testing in 10 US markets, while it’s available to the public in Las Vegas and select users in the Bay Area.

Uber separately announced a partnership with Serve Robotics and White Castle today to deliver food in Serve’s autonomous sidewalk robots.