Elon Musk Won’t Be At Tech Titan Dinner At White House
President Donald Trump will welcome some of the world’s most powerful technology leaders to the White House Thursday night for an exclusive Rose Garden dinner, according to the administration.
The guest list includes Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Google 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.
“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.
The dinner will follow a meeting of the First Lady’s Artificial Intelligence Education Task Force, chaired by Melania Trump, which is focused on expanding AI education opportunities for American students. Several of the dinner guests are expected to join the task force session earlier in the day.
One notable absence from the high-profile event: Elon Musk. Once a close Trump ally — tapped to head the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency — Musk split with the president earlier this year. Since then, Trump has distanced himself from the Tesla billionaire, even rescinding a brief nomination of Musk associate Jared Isaacman to lead NASA and later calling him “totally a Democrat.”
The rift comes amid Musk’s flirtation with creating a new political vehicle — the so-called “America Party.” Musk first teased the idea in July, describing America as a “one-party system” controlled by wasteful spending from both Republicans and Democrats. “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste & graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy,” he posted on X.
But those plans appear to have fizzled. The Wall Street Journal recently reported Musk had paused his “America Party” push to focus on Tesla, SpaceX, and X.
Vice President JD Vance, widely seen as a rising star in the MAGA movement, directly addressed Musk’s ambitions last month, warning him against pursuing a third-party vanity project.
“My advice to Elon would be to try to fix the Republican Party. Try to push it in your own way,” Vance told Fox News. “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 stressed that Musk could accomplish far more by staying loyal to President Trump and working within the GOP: “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.”
With President Trump at the helm, the Republican Party is already reshaping Washington and keeping America’s technological edge sharp. Thursday’s dinner underscores his growing influence not only in politics but in the private sector, as the biggest names in Silicon Valley head to the White House to hear his vision for the country.