By now the world knows which members of the technology aristocracy attended president elect Donald Trump’s tech summit. What is perhaps just as interesting is the list of those who did not.
Salesforce.com co-founder and chairman Marc Benioff was absent. As was Hewlett-Packard Enterprise chief executive Meg Whitman. Coins2Day reached out to the Trump team as well as HPE for comment, and will update this story as needed.
Salesforce had no comment, but according to a Twitter (TWTR) post, Benioff spent part of Wednesday, the day of the summit, at the White House with President Barack Obama (and magician David Blaine.)
Benioff is famous for backing LGBT rights among other liberal causes, and he supported Democrat Hillary Clinton in this year’s election. Whitman, a life-long Republican also backed Clinton and campaigned for her.
Incredible day with @BarackObama and @davidblaine at @WhiteHouse yesterday. I was lucky to get this photo. Pic.twitter.com/h1bGG58cDX
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) December 15, 2016
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It’s been well documented that Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey was not at the New York City Trump event. That was surprising given that Twitter has become Trump’s de facto social media channel. A Trump spokesman subsequently told Reuters that Twitter was too small to make the cut.
For more on the Trump summit, watch:
Salesforce (CRM) and HPE (HPE) are both Coins2Day 500 companies, ranking as the 17th and 21st largest tech companies as measured by market cap respectively, listed on the Nasdaq.
The tech summit did include executives from most of the ten largest Nasdaq (NDAQ) companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft (MSFT), Facebook (FB), Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM), and Cisco (CSCO). Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, who has been criticized by Trump, was also there.
But being a Clinton supporter didn’t seem to prevent an executive from being invited: Apple chief executive Tim Cook also campaigned for Clinton, and he was there.
Benioff and Whitman were not the only people MIA from the Trump event: the top guns from Yahoo (YHOO) (Marissa Mayer), Dell Technologies (Michael Dell), and Hewlett-Packard Inc. (HPQ) Dion Weisler were likewise meeting. It’s unclear whether that was because they were uninvited or declined.
Maybe the Trump Tower boardroom wasn’t big enough.
