The tech titans of Silicon Valley (and a few other places) met with President Elect Donald Trump at his request today. Notably, Trump said that any of them could call him directly if their companies needed help. He said that there is no chain of command here.
“I’m super excited about the possibility that this could be the innovation Administration,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg added, “I’m excited to talk about jobs.”
The complete transcript of Trump’s opening remarks to the group:
“Well, I just want to thank everybody. This is a truly amazing group of people. I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we’ve had asking to come to this meeting (laughter). I will say Peter (Thiel) was sort of saying, no those companies are too small, and these are monster 
companies.
I want to start by thanking Peter because he saw something very early, maybe before we saw it, of course he’s known for that in a different way. He has been so terrific and so outstanding. He got just about the biggest applause at the Republican National Convention. He’s ahead of the curve and I want to thank him and (while shaking his hand) you’re a very special guy.
I want to add that I’m here to help you folks do well and you are doing well right now. I’m very honored by the bounce, everybody is talking about the bounce, so everybody in this room has to like me at least a little bit. We are going to have to try and have that bounce continue.
Perhaps even more importantly, we want you to keep going with the incredible innovation. There is nobody like you in the world. There is nobody like the people in this room. Anything we can do to help this go along, we are going to be there for you. You call my people, you call me, it doesn’t make any difference, we have no formal chain of command around here.
We are honored to have Gary, the President of Goldman Sacks, left Goldman Sacks to do this. And Wilbur, everybody knows Wilbur, they don’t call him Wilbur Ross on Wall Street, they just say oh it’s Wilbur (laughter). There’s nobody like him.
We are going to do fair trade deals, we’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade. Across borders, there are a lot of restrictions and a lot of problems. If you have any ideas on that, that would be great because there are a lot of restrictions and a lot of problems. You probably have less of a problem than some companies because some companies have massive problems, but we are going to solve those problems.”
Who Was There?
Where everyone sat at Trump’s tech meeting today. pic.twitter.com/1WMMRjF1UG
— Rolfe Winkler (@RolfeWinkler) December 14, 2016