Tech billionaires and luxury moguls fill White House table for Trump’s dinner honoring Xi

President Donald Trump hosted a state dinner at the White House on Thursday evening honoring Chinese President Xi Jinping, drawing a guest list stacked with technology executives and global business leaders even as trade tensions and disputes over artificial intelligence continued to shadow the visit.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump greeted Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, ahead of the dinner, with the First Lady wearing a tuxedo inspired outfit featuring an oversized bow. Vice President JD Vance attended among the senior American officials present, alongside Zhang Yongchao, deputy director general of the Department of North American and Oceanian Affairs at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, representing the visiting delegation.

Dressed in black tuxedos, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos all attended, according to the guest list the White House released. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang came with his wife, Lori Huang, and sat alongside former Apple chief executive Tim Cook, who currently chairs Apple’s board of directors. Google and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison also appeared on the list.

Billionaire Bernard Arnault, chief executive of French luxury conglomerate LVMH, which owns brands including Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, attended with his son, Alexandre Arnault. The White House arranged seating so that top technology executives sat at the head table alongside Trump and Xi, a layout that contrasted with a comparable state banquet Beijing hosted in May, according to White House officials.

Huang’s presence carried particular weight given the backdrop of the visit. Competition between Washington and Beijing over artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductor technology has intensified throughout the year, and Nvidia along with other American chipmakers have found themselves caught between US efforts to restrict China’s access to cutting edge computing hardware and the pull of China’s enormous consumer market.

The dinner capped a day of formal diplomacy between the two leaders, who addressed friction over trade, artificial intelligence policy and Taiwan earlier in the day before turning to the evening’s ceremonial proceedings. The gathering marks one of the most closely watched displays of engagement between Washington’s technology and business elite and Beijing’s leadership since trade tensions between the two countries began escalating again this year.

The scale of corporate star power at Thursday’s dinner echoes, though under different circumstances, a separate White House tech industry dinner Trump hosted in September last year, when 33 Silicon Valley leaders including Altman, Zuckerberg, Cook and Bill Gates gathered in the newly renovated Rose Garden, an event that notably excluded both Musk and Huang at the time. Musk’s attendance at Thursday’s state dinner for Xi marks a shift from that earlier gathering, where his absence drew attention amid a public falling out with Trump. Huang’s presence, at both his prior absence and now his prominent placement at Thursday’s head table, tracks closely with Nvidia’s escalating stake in the outcome of Washington’s trade and export policy toward China.

The guest list underscores how central the technology sector has become to the broader US China relationship, with executives whose companies depend heavily on Chinese manufacturing, Chinese consumer markets, or unrestricted access to advanced chips now occupying some of the most visible seats at high level diplomatic functions between the two governments. As Trump and Xi continue working through unresolved disputes over tariffs, semiconductor export controls and Taiwan in the days following the dinner, the makeup of Thursday’s guest list offers a visible signal of which private sector leaders the White House currently views as central stakeholders in that relationship, and how directly their business interests now intersect with the state of US China diplomacy.