President-elect Trump told tech leaders his transition operation has “no formal chain of command” during a meeting at Trump Tower Wednesday afternoon.
Trump gathered top executives from some of the biggest technology companies in the world to discuss growing the American private sector. Among the people attending the meeting were Vice President-elect Mike Pence, his incoming Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, incoming White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s three oldest children.
“There’s nobody like the people in this room and anything we can do to help this go on and really be there for you, then you’ll call my people, you’ll call me, it doesn’t make any difference,” Trump said. “We have no formal chain of command around here.”
The executives attending the meeting were:
- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle
- Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
- Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet
- Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco
- Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel Corp.
- Ginni Rometty, president and CEO of IBM
- Larry Page, Google co-founder
- Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook
- Elon Musk, Chairman and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla
- Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
- Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber Technologies
Trump was set to meet with Cook and Musk separately as well.
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and one of Trump’s few prominent supporters from the tech industry, helped organize the meeting.
Trump told the tech leaders his goal was to help them do well.
“I’m here to help you folks do well, and you’re doing well right now and I’m very honored by the bounce,” Trump said. “They’re all talking about the bounce. So right now everybody in this room has to like me — at least a little bit — but we’re going to try and have that bounce continue. And perhaps even more importantly, we want you to keep going with the incredible innovation.”
