Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, who has castigated Trump for his travel ban and the USA withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty, responded with praise for Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is leading the administration's technology sector outreach.
Cook also offered advice to Trump, suggesting that the federal government needs to be more focused on the people, which was not how it now operated.
A 2016 U.S. Government Accountability Office report estimated the U.S. government spent more than $80 billion in IT annually, excluding classified operations. Few technology specialists from the White House attended.
At a White House tech summit that lured Silicon Valley's most powerful and obsequious, Kushner made a rare public speaking appearance to mostly say some unobjectionable stuff about floppy disks, a topic surely in the front of every American's mind.
"Our goal is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government's technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens, stronger protection from cyberattacks", Mr. Trump said Monday at the White House during a meeting with more than a dozen executives from some of the nation's top technology companies.
Cook will join several other heavy hitters in the tech industry, including Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, at what the White House is calling an "American Technology Council roundtable".
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After the conference and a working dinner the leaders are expected to attend a friendly football match between their two countries.
During the event, Trump said, "Today many of our agencies rely on painfully outdated technology, and yet, we have the greatest people in technology". Mastercard Inc MA.N CEO Ajay Banga said his company wanted to assist with cyber security issues.
Cook even approached Trump behind the scenes of Monday's meeting to convey the concerns from the technology employees about the administration's approach to immigration, as a source familiar with the exchange told MSNBC.
Days after the Jinping's visit, Ivanka Trump's brand was also granted provisional approval for four trademarks in China.
The day-long affair kicked off a week of conversations about the state of the government infrastructure as well as tech policies like cybersecurity, talent recruitment, and government and private sector partnerships.
President Trump is asking the CEOs of the world's largest tech companies for help in modernizing the American government system. Tesla CEO Elon Musk left two of Trump's advisory councils earlier this month after the president announced that he would pull the USA out of the Paris climate agreement. It seeks to overhaul government functions using ideas from the business sector.
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