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Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was at another table, with a serious look on his face. His wife is sat beside him, with Jared Kushner and White House chief of staff Monica Crowley nearby.<\/p>\n
The White House invited scores of US officials, as well as conservative broadcasters, tech industry bosses, social media CEOs and other corporate executives. <\/p>\n
Attendees included members of Trump’s cabinet, as well as family members like his children Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany. <\/p>\n
Bosses from the tech industry in attendance included Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.<\/p>\n
Both Cook and Huang were seated at the same table as Trump and Xi. As was Musk, who previously worked in Trump’s administration leading the effort to shrink government.<\/p>\n
Other companies whose leaders were in attendance include General Motors, Visa, Paramount Skydance, ExxonMobil and more.<\/p>\n
Social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg also attended, as well as Jeff Yaas, the American billionaire who owns a share of TikTok.<\/p>\n
“Everybody wanted to be there,” Trump said ahead of the event. “I would say you have the entire tech world, the entire banking world, and a lot more.”<\/p>\n
But one notable absence was Anthropic – one of the biggest and most valuable AI firms in the world. The BBC has asked Anthropic if it was invited, or if they chose not to be there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n