It will be a tech-heavy couple of days for President-elect Donald Trump, who is scheduled to meet with Microsoft founder Bill Gates Tuesday (Dec. 13) and other technology executives on Wednesday (Dec. 14), the Trump transition team said.
"The President-elect has said that we need to get back to innovators inventing things here in America and make sure that we have the business climate where companies [that] are just starting or people who have these ideas can get out there and have access to capital and the tax structure that fosters innovation," transition team spokesman Jason Miller said of the meetings. "This is the type of president we're going to see from Donald Trump. We want to make sure that we are leading on the world stage and brining the best and the brightest together."
He would not comment on which of those "best and brightest" are scheduled Wednesday.
He did not comment on the Gates meeting beyond referring reporters to a Gates interview with CNBC Tuesday in which Gates likened Trump to JFK and had "very favorable things to say about the president-elect's dedication to innovation," Miller said.
According to a CNBC transcript, Gates said: "[I]n the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that. I think whether it's education or stopping epidemics ... [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump's] administration [is] going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and have American leadership through innovation."
According to the New York Times, tech companies expected at the meeting include Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, IBM, MIntel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Tesla.
According to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign contributions to candidates, those nine tech companies contributed a total of $4,169,828 to the campaign of Hillary Clinton and $28,225 to Trump (all from Oracle). Bill Gates may think Trump could be good for innovation, but Microsoft gave $710,000 to Clinton (the second most behind Alphabet/google's $1,315,000, while it gave none to Trump.
