Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sam Altman score invites to White House state dinner for Xi: Hottest ticket in town
Several of the heaviest hitters in US tech and business have scored invites to next week’s White House state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are among the tech titans on the guest list for the Sept.24 fete, a US official revealed Friday. NVIDIA President Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser are also invited. Tim Cook, who left his CEO post at Apple last month, secured a spot at the table as well. Musk, Huang, Cook and Fraser previously joined President Trump in Beijing and attended Xi’s lavish banquet for the commander-in-chief at the Great Hall of the People. Xi is arriving in Washington on Wednesday and is expected to be personally greeted by Trump when he lands at Joint Base Andrews. The core bilateral summit meetings will take place the following day, and the state dinner is Thursday. It will be just the second state visit hosted by Trump and first lady Melania Trump this term, after the state visit by King Charles and Queen Camilla in April. “The formal dinner is the hottest ticket in town,” a senior administration official involved in the planning said, noting that top political, corporate and tech leaders are all vying for a “very limited number of seats.”“This dinner is a big one, as China is the biggest of them all, and they all want a place at the table,” the official added. An official arrival ceremony, an inspection of troops, a spouse’s program and the formal dinner are among the elements that elevate the visit and make it more grand than typically working visits from state leaders. The visit comes amid a time of high tensions between Washington and Beijing, as they battle for technological dominance in artificial intelligence. Some Chinese business executives are expected to attend as part of Xi’s delegation and the state dinner will give the two sides a chanc...