Musk will not attend Trump tech CEO dinner at White House

U.S. President Donald Trump will host two dozen high-profile tech and business leaders for an inaugural event in the White House's renovated Rose Garden on Thursday. 

Invitees include Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, according to a list confirmed by a White House official. 

Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who previously served as a special government employee in the first few months of the latest Trump administration and later had a public falling out with the president, posted on X that he was invited but could not attend.

"A representative of mine will be there," he wrote.

The meeting will be held over dinner after a separate White House event on artificial intelligence hosted by first lady Melania Trump.

The gathering underscores what has been a close but complicated relationship between Trump and the Big Tech sector in his second administration. 

Many of the aforementioned executives have sought friendlier ties with Trump, often appearing at events alongside the president to announce moves that align with the administration's goals on emerging technologies and American reshoring. 

Invitees to the event also include other tech leaders, such as OpenAI president Greg Brockman; Google co-founder Sergey Brin; Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar; and co-founder of Scale AI and head of a superintelligence team at Meta, Alexandr Wang.

CEOs such as Google's Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Oracle's Safra Catz, and Blue Origin's David Limp have also been invited. 

Unsurprisingly, David Sacks, a venture capitalist serving as the White House's crypto and AI czar, is expected to be at the event. Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift4, is also expected to attend despite Trump withdrawing his nomination to run NASA in June.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that David Limp is CEO of Blue Origin. A previous version incorrectly stated which company he leads.