Elon Musk, AI and tech titans, venture capitalists invited to pre-inaugural dinner at the dawn of the Trump era
FIRST ON FOX: A select group of tech industry titans and venture capital investors will gather Washington, DC, this week to welcome the incoming Trump administration and celebrate new opportunities for global innovation in artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship.
Presidents and CEOs from the latest AI technology companies and their big financial backers, along with staff from the new administration, will attend a dinner Thursday hosted by Outside the Box Ventures, a company founded last year by journalist-turned-investor-banker Katherine Tarbox, together with Laurent Bili, the French ambassador to the USA
The list of those invited to dinner on Thursday includes the head of “DOGA”. Elon MuskSilicon Valley investor and Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, NVCA CEO Bobby Franklin, incoming White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, investor Joe Lonsdale, and Narya co-founder Colin Greenspon.
“This gathering is more than a discussion. We hope it symbolizes a new chapter in public-private collaboration to harness the transformative power of technology for the nation’s future,” a source close to the planning told Fox News Digital. The event comes days before the inauguration of President-elect Trump as the nation’s 47th president.
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Trump and Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in November 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
America’s leading entrepreneurs want to take advantage of what Microsoft’s Brad Smith called “a golden opportunity for American technology and economic competitiveness.” The goal is to replicate the combined forces of industry leaders and government resources that Trump marshaled for Operation Warp Speed, his first administration’s much-vaunted COVID-19 vaccine program, for advances in artificial intelligence.
Bili’s participation reflects how interested France is in being a leader in artificial intelligence, with a global action summit on the rapidly developing technology to be held in Paris this February, and he believes the US is a valuable partner in this effort.
“We believe this is the hottest ticket for tech and venture capital until the inauguration,” the source said. Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Franklin, executive director of the National Venture Capital Association, a venture capital industry trade group, confirmed that he plans to attend. He told Fox News Digital that there is a lot of excitement in his industry for several Trump employees with venture capital backgrounds, including Sacks, a tech billionaire, and Vice President-elect JD Vance.
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Katherine Tarbox, a former journalist turned investment banker, founded Outside the Box Ventures 2024. Her firm is organizing a gathering of top tech executives and venture capitalists in Washington, DC, ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, a source familiar with the planning said. (Treats outside the box)
“One of our challenges is always education, and there’s always a lack of understanding about what the venture industry does, how it works with entrepreneurs, how it creates great technology and drugs and everything else in the economy,” Franklin said. “And so having people who understand that coming to the board is a wonderful, welcome situation from our perspective.”
The dinner comes at a critical time for the world-leading US AI startups but faces tough competition from China and other foreign opponents.
US companies received more than 40% of global AI funding in 2023, surpassing China and the European Union combined. In the same year, US venture capital firms released $17.9 billion in funding for AI startups, contributing to leaps and bounds in generative AI technology popularized by ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok.
More than 10,000 AI-related patents have been filed by U.S. entities in the past five years, showcasing a deep bench of U.S. innovators that Franklin and others believe Trump is ready to support.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File)
But analysts warn that China’s recent developments in artificial intelligence technology pose a challenge to US dominance in the field and may even threaten US national and economic security.
A recent report published by the American Edge Project warned that “China is rapidly developing its own open source ecosystem as an alternative to US technology and using it as a Trojan horse to implant its CCP values into the global infrastructure.”
The report called China’s progress “both significant and troubling.”
“Open source AI tools developed in China are already outperforming Western models on key metrics while operating at dramatically lower costs, accelerating global adoption. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which spans more than 155 countries on four continents, and its Along the Digital Silk Road (DSR), China is exporting its technology around the world, fueling increased global dependency, undermining democratic norms, and threatening American leadership and global security.”
Vice President-elect JD Vance has a venture capital background that has excited industry leaders eager to work with the Trump administration. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images/File)
The Trump administration is widely expected to let the private sector lead the way as the US confronts China. While the Biden administration has prioritized putting in place “fences” for artificial intelligence development through regulators, analysts at Perkins Coie note that Trump has promised to rescind a Biden-era executive order that set policy for federal agency purchases and use of artificial intelligence. The 2024 Republican platform claims that Biden’s policies “hold back innovation and impose radical left-wing ideas,” apparently in reference to demands that the National Institute of Standards and Technology develop guidelines to ensure that artificial intelligence models are unbiased and do not discriminate based on race or gender.
Additionally, Trump’s appointment of Sacks as the AI czar signals that his thinking on artificial intelligence is in line with Sacks’ associates Musk and Thiel, who each co-founded PayPal and are pushing for a deregulatory agenda.
“The new czar will likely be tasked with coordinating with federal agencies and outside stakeholders to ensure consistent guidance regarding the use of artificial intelligence in the federal government. We expect Sacks to be less focused on the potential harms of artificial intelligence and more on promoting and facilitating artificial intelligence.” the intelligence of innovation with fewer constraints,” said Perkins Coie.
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Thursday’s gathering, however, is strictly a non-partisan event Great interest of Silicon Valley in building relations with the Republican administration signals changes in political priorities.
Previously, issues like immigration and climate change alienated Big Tech from the GOP. And when Trump first ran for president, his populist MAGA movement was an unknown factor that led many entrepreneurs to keep their distance.
But the growing recognition of artificial intelligence as a national priority seems to be bridging that gap. So is a more clearly defined Trump, with key players in his second administration having ties to the venture capital world.
“You know, for sure the political underdog won in 2016,” Franklin said. “Now, he’s not an outsider.”
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
