WASHINGTON — It’s the richest table ever assembled.
An extraordinary cadre of the country’s most powerful tech titans with a collective fortune of over $1.8 trillion converged upon the White House Tuesday for President Trump’s summit on artificial intelligence.
Despite many of them competing against each other — in some cases very bitterly — the multi-billionaire president managed to bring them together at the White House to discuss how America and outflank China — and the guardrails needed for the nascent tech.
The summit illustrated Trump’s eagerness to have the federal government collaborate with and elevate the private sector, despite pressure he’s faced to regulate the industry more aggressively.
“I just have to do what’s right,” he told reporters when asked about the dicy politics of AI.
“All I can tell you is that these big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities,” he added. “It’s going to be so good for the people.”
Trump himself shared the table seating — with SpaceX, xAI and Tesla near-trillionaire Elon Musk to his right, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to his right and Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson across the table from him.
Anthropic founder Dario Amodei was near the right end of the table while OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman sat roughly across from him.
Amid the tough polling on AI, Trump has worked to rebrand it as “super intelligence” to highlight its potential to radically improve people’s lives.
The gathering took place just after Trump’s glitzy summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week. Trump has repeatedly underscored his desire to ensure the US wins the AI race against China, regardless of the political costs.
Ironically, some of Trump’s guests, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, publicly suggested that there should be a collective slowdown in AI development, and others have voiced support for some regulatory oversight.
Critics such as Trump’s former AI czar David Sacks, who was also in attendance, contended that AI titans were primarily seeking liability protections because some of their models have inadvertently hacked other companies, and their business practices have faced scrutiny.
Instead of a rigid oversight structure, the group unveiled a framework for self-regulation that Trump dubbed “morally binding,” laid out in a document titled: “White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.”
Trump had invited some of those tech titans to his inauguration last year.
Here are some of the richest tech titans who partook in the AI summit.
Elon Musk
Net worth: ~$929.9B, according to Forbes.
Space and electric car guru, who appears to have patched things up with Trump long ago after their epic falling out last year, has fluctuated between being an AI optimist and doomer.
But at the White House on Tuesday, he indicated that he’s been trending more towards optimism lately and believes the “most likely outcome” is for the technology to usher in an “age of abundance.”
He’s making big bets on AI with xAI and SpaceX.
Jeff Bezos
Net worth: ~$370.2B, according to Forbes.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has long defended AI from critics’ fears that it could spark a jobless apocalypse, partook in the summit, but didn’t stick around for Trump’s gaggle with reporters afterward.
Mark Zuckerberg
Net worth: ~$249.4B, according to Forbes.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, whose company just unveiled its new agentic AI personal assistant, Muse, defended the “accord” as an important first step.
“The idea isn’t that this is the only thing that we will ever do. It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to,” he told reporters.
Zuckerberg, who had once drawn Trump’s wrath and banned him from all his company’s platforms, appeared chummy with the president during the event.
Jensen Huang
Net worth: ~$199.4B, according to Forbes.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose firm supplies the cutting-edge graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to power the frontier AI models, was greet with the most fanfare from Trump.
He called it the AI boom the “largest industrial revolution in history.”
Greg Brockman
Net worth: ~$25.5B, according to Forbes.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman attended the summit in lieu of CEO Sam Altman, who had a conflict. Altman has feuded with some of the other tech titans there, particularly Musk. The two men were at the White House together last week for the summit with Xi.
