Silicon Valley Execs To Meet With Trump

This should be an interesting one to watch.

In New York City, on Wednesday (Dec. 14) of this week, prominent Silicon Valley tech industry leaders are reportedly planning to attend President-Elect Donald Trump’s technology roundtable meeting.

During the election, there was a contentious push-and-pull between President-Elect Donald Trump and Silicon Valley. The majority of Silicon Valley leaders have been at odds with Trump since the beginning — largely due to the Trump campaign’s messages about limiting free trade and its staunch anti-immigration stance — with the notable exception of PayPal Cofounder Peter Thiel.

Now that the reality of a Trump administration has finally started to settle in, it appears many in the industry are looking to build bridges where they can rather than burn them for the next four years.

Among the attendees, according to The Wall Street Journal, are Apple’s Tim Cook, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and representatives from IBM, Oracle and Cisco, among others. It’s unclear whether or not Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also will attend, though he reportedly received an invitation.

As of yet, there is no official word on the agenda for the technology roundtable meeting, though, throughout his campaign, Trump emphasized a need to boost American job growth and has repeatedly targeted tech companies, including Apple and IBM, for outsourcing their labor.

Additionally, Trump called for a boycott of Apple earlier this year after the tech giant denied the FBI backdoor access to the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters as part of its investigation. Apple said accommodating the requests would set a bad legal precedent and could potentially endanger user privacy.

Former Breitbart CEO and now chief strategist in the Trump administration Stephen Bannon has also called out the tech industry on a number of “issues,” notably including the relatively high demographic diversity among Silicon Valley’s top CEOs in his list of “problems.”