When the BBC entered the dining hall for the dinner, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was standing over a table and appeared to be telling an entertaining story that had two others nearby barreled over with laughter.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was at another table, with a serious look on his face. His wife is sat beside him, with Jared Kushner and White House chief of staff Monica Crowley nearby.
The White House invited scores of US officials, as well as conservative broadcasters, tech industry bosses, social media CEOs and other corporate executives.
Attendees included members of Trump’s cabinet, as well as family members like his children Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany.
Bosses from the tech industry in attendance included Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
Both Cook and Huang were seated at the same table as Trump and Xi. As was Musk, who previously worked in Trump’s administration leading the effort to shrink government.
Other companies whose leaders were in attendance include General Motors, Visa, Paramount Skydance, ExxonMobil and more.
Social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg also attended, as well as Jeff Yaas, the American billionaire who owns a share of TikTok.
“Everybody wanted to be there,” Trump said ahead of the event. “I would say you have the entire tech world, the entire banking world, and a lot more.”
But one notable absence was Anthropic – one of the biggest and most valuable AI firms in the world. The BBC has asked Anthropic if it was invited, or if they chose not to be there.
