White House dinner drew tech leaders; Dario Amodei was absent

A photo shared by Doge Designer showed a White House dinner featuring Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, with prime seating for Elon Musk, Melania Trump, China’s first lady, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Apple CEO Tim Cook. The wider guest list included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Sergey Brin, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon and New York Stock Exchange president Lynn Martin.

Dario Amodei was not there. It was unclear whether an invitation never materialized or he declined it. One view was that he should have been included because Anthropic is important and his hard line on China makes his perspective relevant.

The guest list was also described as largely lacking podcasters: David Sacks, identified as both a podcaster and venture capitalist, was included, while Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink were not. That omission was called disappointing.