Trump’s AI Billionaire Lunch Dates Have So Far Spent $145 Million On Political Candidates

At the meeting with AI executives at the White House on September 29, 
Donald Trump was flanked by Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, 
Elon Musk and Google's Sundar Pichai, as AMD's Lisa Su, Microsoft's Satya Nadella 
and other AI executives and administration officials stood behind him.

By Giacomo Tognini, Giacomo Tognini is a deputy editor at Forbes covering billionaires.

AI’s leading lights were all smiles at the president’s event, displaying a united front on the raging battle over AI regulation. Their $145 million of political spending tells a more complicated story.

Trump’s AI Billionaire Lunch Dates Have So Far Spent $145 Million On Political Candidates

With less than five weeks until the midterm elections, fears of runaway AI agents hacking websites and possibly destroying humanity have spread into the political sphere. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump responded by convening an elite group of the country’s leading AI executives to the East Room of the White House for a two-hour lunch.

Seated beside Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and SpaceX’s Elon Musk—two of the 10 richest people in the world—the president sounded an optimistic tone, brandishing a brief, one-page document calling on AI companies to self-police their frontier models. He called the agreement “morally binding.”

Only six of the 14 billionaires in attendance—Musk, Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Google’s Sundar Pichai—actually signed it. Among those who didn’t: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, AMD’s Lisa Su and Palantir’s Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar. (Oracle’s Larry Ellison, a known Trump ally, didn’t attend. Neither did OpenAI’s Sam Altman due to the company’s DevDay event.)