Photo: Donald Trump speaks as PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel (C) and Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook look on during a meeting with technology leaders at Trump Tower in New York U.S., December 14, 2016. REUTERS
With his children and Peter Thiel at his side, Predator-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday told Silicon Valley elites his regime will do "anything we can do" to help the same tech industry he mocked during his campaign.
Attendees included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and The Washington Post, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet and Google, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Oracle CEO Safra A. Catz, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.
Trump told them his regime is "going to be here for you. You'll call my people, you'll call me. We have no formal chain of command around here."
Remember now, the invited elites had to literally ascend a golden elevator to arrive at this Trump Tower meeting with America's favorite populist man of the people.
"This is truly an amazing group of people," Trump told them. "I want to add that 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 continued.
"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."
"There's nobody like you in the world. There's nobody like the people in this room."
"We're going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders," said Trump.
It's not clear what he meant. Maybe the "bounce" referred to the chief narcissist's perception of his popularity as unscientifically gauged on the internet.
NYT:
Shortly after that, the press was ushered out of the room. It wasn't immediately clear what unfolded after that.
Trump was joined by sons Donald Jr. and Eric, daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as he is at many of the official meetings he has held as Predator-Elect. It's almost like the Trump *family* is running America, which is so weird, because we didn't elect them but here they are, present at every meeting.
Trump was flanked by Mike Pence on his right, and Peter Thiel on his left.
From Recode:
President-elect Donald Trump; to his left is Peter Thiel, board member of Facebook, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. To Trump's right is incoming Vice President Mike Pence. To Pence's right is Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. To her right is Larry Page, co-founder of Google. Next to Page is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is seated in the left foreground of the picture.
Donald Trump's children Eric, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. are seated to the right of Jeff Bezos.
Not present: Jack Dorsey of Twitter.
Safra Catz, Oracle CEO arrives at Trump Tower pic.twitter.com/HAxD3JY9uM
— Joe Bernstein (@Bernstein) December 14, 2016
tfw u realize ur the 1st in the room who'll be headed to the camps https://t.co/SgeJuHtltS pic.twitter.com/OzJKhDaJhw
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) December 14, 2016
JUST IN: Amazon CEO & Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos arrives at Trump Tower for tech summit with the President-elect. pic.twitter.com/t7Ef31RTYT
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) December 14, 2016
RNC spokesman Sean Spicer: "I'm sure we'll have followup meetings and Jack Dorsey can join us." pic.twitter.com/5qRcIfM868
— Seth Fiegerman (@sfiegerman) December 14, 2016
Larry Page's face here says it all. pic.twitter.com/j8nlCmhWms
— Seth Fiegerman (@sfiegerman) December 14, 2016
Eric Schmidt just arrived at Trump Tower pic.twitter.com/ZvVu3h1wgh
— Johana Bhuiyan (@JMBooyah) December 14, 2016