To paraphrase former President Calvin Coolidge, who served in the 1920s, the chief business of the American people is business. President Donald Trump has fully embraced that idea, especially with Big Tech.
On Thursday, several players from the world of business-from AI chips to defense to autos to banking-attended a state dinner in the East Room of the White House that capped off a day of talks between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Sitting at the head table with Trump and Xi were Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX; Nvidia's Jensen Huang; Tim Cook, who just stepped down as CEO of Apple and now serves as board chairman; and Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices.
Other high-profile guests included OpenAI's Sam Altman, Alphabet's Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon, Citigroup CEO Jane, David Ellison of Paramount Skydance, and Michael Dell of Dell.
There were more. Executives from Meta Platforms, Zoom, Boeing, GE Aerospace, OpenAI, Lockheed Martin, Micron Technology, Qualcomm, ExxonMobil, and General Motors attended.
The combined market value of those firms is almost $33 trillion, roughly three times the market value of the entire Shanghai Composite Index.
Musk was seated close to Trump. He, of course, was an adviser to the president and ran DOGE, the now-shuttered Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump and Musk had a falling-out last year, but are now back on good terms. Their brief break-up, though, caused a lot of volatility for Tesla stock. SpaceX was a private company until Musk took it public this summer.
On Friday, both Tesla and SpaceX were down 1.2% in midday trading. Neither drop seems tied to news coming out of the state dinner.
The drops have cost Musk, the world's richest human and its first trillionaire, about $13 billion. He is still a trillionaire-or essentially so. His Tesla and SpaceX stock is worth north of $1 trillion. Some calculations make a variety of adjustments that can move the number down a little.
The industrial stocks were relative winners coming out of the dinner. GE, GM, and Boeing were up an average of about 1.5% each.
Maybe investors are looking for some movement on trade, which could mean orders for Boeing. (GE sells a lot of jet engines to Boeing.) As for GM, there wasn't any news that Chinese cars were coming to America-a concern since the topic was raised by Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat.
Who knows what the dinner conversations touched on. But the sesame-crusted sea bass with baby bok choy and roasted garden eggplant sounds delicious.
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