Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos plans to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s meeting of tech-industry executives this Wednesday in New York, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
Amazon’s (AMZN) chief executive is expected to join other tech heavyweights already planning on attending, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, as well as Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, CEO and chairman of Google parent Alphabet, respectively.
Previous reports indicate the meeting on Wednesday will take place at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the same building where the president-elect has lived for the past three decades and apparently plans on living part-time following his inauguration this January.
The press are currently not invited to attend. CBS News reported Catz, who previously met with Trump in November, plans to discuss solutions for reforming the tax code, reducing regulation, and negotiating better trade deals.
Not everyone, however, may be as eager to break bread with the president-elect, given that many tech leaders have publicly clashed with Trump. Cook and Page, for example, participated in a discussion back in May at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum around how to stop Trump’s nomination.
Trump has publicly criticized Apple (AAPL) for manufacturing its phones in China and refusing to provide security backdoors to law enforcement. Meanwhile, Trump and Bezos locked horns when the president-elect temporarily blacklisted The Washington Post, which Bezos bought in 2013, from campaign events, and described Bezos’ ownership of the Post as a tax dodge.
The president-elect has also come down hard on issues considered vital to the tech industry’s interests, including immigration and trade. Indeed, a Trump administration would possibly restrict the number of workers who enter the country with an H-1B visa — a type of visa employed by some tech workers and the same kind of visa Trump’s wife Melania received in 1996 to legally work in the U.S.
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JP Mangalindan is a senior correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.
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