Donald Trump extended an olive branch to the titans of technology on Wednesday, telling them his goal is “to help you folks do well” at a meeting at his New York headquarters.

“We have no formal chain of command around here,” the president-elect told the most powerful men and women in the technology industry, whom he encouraged to “call my people” and “call me”.



“We’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders,” he told the audience.

Trump had clashed with tech leaders before his election, suggesting he would start a monopoly investigation into Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, was in attendance, and calling for a boycott of Apple after the tech company declined to break into the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers.

But in a conference room in Trump Tower on Wednesday, Trump encouraged coziness among bankers, the government and tech executives hand-selected by the PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel at the industry summit held at Manhattan’s Trump Tower. “Everybody knows Wilbur,” Trump said of his nominee for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross. “They never call him Wilbur Ross on Wall Street. They just say, ‘Oh, it’s Wilbur.’” Trump also introduced Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, who left the investment bank earlier this week to serve as Trump’s chief economic adviser.

The president-elect told the assembled CEOs that he would eliminate restrictions on international trade, a statement at odds with his hard stance against the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during his campaign. “[T]here are a lot of border restrictions and a lot of border problems,” Trump said. “You probably have less of a problem than some companies. Some companies have massive problems. But we’re going to solve those problems.”



Journalists were allowed to listen to only the first four minutes of the multi-hour meeting.

Among the attendees seen entering the building were Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, and Brian R Krzanich of Intel.



Trump opened the event by boasting of how many would-be-attendees he had turned away at the suggestion of Thiel. “I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we’ve had, asking to come to this meeting,” Trump told attendees. “And I will say Peter [Thiel] would sort of say, ‘You know, that company’s too small.’ And these are monster companies.”



Donald Trump Jr, whom the president-elect has said will run his businesses during the senior Trump’s administration, attended the meeting. Alex Karp, the CEO of Thiel’s own data analytics firm, Palantir, managed to get an invitation. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who founded the service Trump often uses to communicate with the public, did not.

Dorsey is said to be on the outs with the Trump camp after refusing the add emojis to Trump’s Twitter campaign hashtag #CrookedHillary. Gary Coby, a Trump advertising staffer, detailed the dispute on the blogging platform Medium last month; early Wednesday, Politico reported that Trump had taken revenge by excluding Dorsey.

After the meeting, Trump held a private conference with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was named to an advisory team working for Trump, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she worried deeply about the surveillance state under Trump. “My hope is that the tech industry will stand with their users when it comes to encryption and mass surveillance and free speech and network neutrality and not just talk about HB1 visas,” Cohn told the Guardian. It may have become the job of tech companies to represent their user base to the government, Cohn said, but that was an unacceptable state of affairs. “We also want to remind the president-elect that if you think that by talking to Tim Cook you’re talking to all the people who own a Mac, that’s not right.”

Trump had an obligation to speak to people who represent technology users, not just technology sellers, Cohn said. “We’re on Twitter too, if you [Trump] want to DM me,” she said. “We would be saying the same thing if Hillary Clinton had been meeting with tech leaders.”