Friday, Sep 25, 2026
1 Trump-Xi State Dinner Draws Musk, Bezos and Altman but No Chinese CEOs↩︎ 🌐 Geopolitics Sep 24, 8:27 PM EDT 278/87
No prominent Chinese chief executives attended Thursday's White House state dinner for Xi Jinping, even as the guests included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google's Sundar Pichai, Apple's Tim Cook, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and AMD's Lisa Su. GM CEO Mary Barra, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg and Google cofounder Sergey Brin also attended the dinner, held during Xi's first US state visit since 2015.
Xi came to Washington without a corporate delegation. The Wall Street Journal reported before the trip that he was unlikely to bring executives, and Bloomberg reported that the summit would draw a robust group of US corporate leaders with no comparable Chinese delegation, raising questions about the prospects for striking new deals. The South China Morning Post reported that US investment concerns stalled plans for Chinese business leaders to join the trip.
The dinner came as Trump and Xi agreed to extend their trade truce to Jan. 10, 2027. Ahead of it, a small group of Chinese CEOs with US visas had arrived in Washington separately from Xi's official delegation and were still waiting to learn whether they would receive invitations, with their attendance dependent on the final stages of US-China diplomatic negotiations.