Elon Musk Won’t Be At Tech Titan Dinner At White House
President Donald Trump will host top tech executives for a White House dinner Thursday night, with attendees including Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and a dozen other leaders from major artificial intelligence and technology firms, according to the White House.
Notably absent is Elon Musk, once a close Trump ally who was tapped to lead the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency but split publicly with the president earlier this year.
“The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world. The president looks forward to welcoming top business, political, and tech leaders for this dinner and the many dinners to come on the new, beautiful Rose Garden patio,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement.
The dinner will follow a meeting of the White House’s new Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force, chaired by First Lady Melania Trump. Some dinner guests are also expected to join the task force session, which is focused on expanding AI education for American students, the Associated Press reported.
The White House said the guest list will also include Google cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and cofounder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO chairman Vivek Ranadive, Palantir executive Shyam Sankar, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
Isaacman, a former associate of Elon Musk, was briefly nominated by Trump to lead NASA before the president rescinded the pick around the time of his split with Musk. Trump later called Isaacman “totally a Democrat.”
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance pushed back last month against a report linking him to conversations with Musk and other high-profile donors about a possible 2028 presidential run, while also warning the billionaire entrepreneur not to move forward with plans for a third political party.
“I saw the story, and as far as I can tell, the story is completely fake,” Vance said during an appearance on Fox News. “I’ve never talked with Elon Musk, or, frankly, any other donor about 2028.”
Vance’s comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported Musk had paused efforts to launch the “America Party” and was instead refocusing on his companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and X, his social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The report noted that Musk’s allies said he had not permanently ruled out creating the new party and could revisit the idea at a later date.
Musk first floated the idea of the America Party in July, writing on X that the United States had devolved into what he described as a “one-party system.” He argued both Democrats and Republicans contributed to wasteful government spending, and that a new party was needed to “give people their freedom back.”
“When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” Musk wrote at the time.
But on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, Vance offered direct advice to the tech mogul: work within Trump’s Republican Party rather than attempt to create a new vehicle.
“My advice to Elon would be to try to fix the Republican Party. Try to push it in your own way,” Vance said. “Disagree with me all you want, disagree with the president of the United States, but don’t pretend that you can make a big difference with a third party.”
Vance, a former Ohio senator, argued Musk would have far more influence if he remained aligned with the GOP and President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“I think Elon would make a much bigger difference if he stayed loyal to President Trump’s Republican Party, and if he had disagreements, express those disagreements from the inside as opposed to from the outside,” Vance said.
