Tim Cook will meet with President-elect Donald Trump this week

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Tim Cook is one of a number of tech executives who will meet with President-elect Donald Trump this week, a new report claims.

The meeting will take place at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Wednesday, and will also be attended by Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, alongside a handful of others.

The invites were sent out from Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and are part of an initiative being pushed by investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel to get the incoming President to reach out to the tech community.

Tim Cook and Donald Trump were on opposite sides of this year’s electoral race. Cook criticized Trump throughout the election cycle. A Hillary Clinton supporter who hosted fundraisers and was even considered as a possible VP, Cook was reportedly part of a group of billionaires, tech CEOs and politicians who flew to a private island resort to discuss plans for helping defeat Trump.

In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Cook sent a letter to Apple staffers saying that while there are “uncertainties ahead, you can be confident that Apple’s North Star hasn’t changed.”

Trump’s suggested policies have so far been a mixed bag for Apple. On the one hand, Trump has talked about giving companies incentives to bring their overseas cash piles back home, which is an idea Cook has been outspokenly in favor of in the past.

At the same time, the possibility of extra tariffs placed on Chinese imports could well hurt Apple, particularly if the Chinese government decides to hurt American brands in China as a result.

Cook isn’t the only Silicon Valley exec to have been opposed to Donald Trump. Entrepreneur, VC and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was a big Trump critic is not attending the event this week. The same is true of Mark Cuban and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman.

Others including Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston have also declined the invitiation for a variety of reasons.

 

 

Source: Recode

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