Musk, Cook and more: here’s who was at the dinner with Xi in San Francisco
Top US business leaders paid $40,000 to attend dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. All the names and details
From Elon Musk to Tim Cook: here are some of the American captains of industry who paid 40 thousand dollars each to share a moment of intimacy with Xi Jinping at the dinner organized in his honor in San Francisco where the Chinese leader had just met , on the sidelines of the Apec Forum, his colleague Biden.
$40,000 for dinner with Xi
According to Reuters, the approximately 300 people who took part in the dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday evening at the Hyatt Agency in San Francisco, who was present on American soil to participate in the Apec Forum and to meet his colleague Biden, paid 40 thousand dollars each.
The tables
As reported by the New York Times , in the lounge of the luxurious hotel 34 tables have been prepared with roses and orchids, numbered from 1 to 39, each number being skipped with a 4, which in the Chinese language recalls death, and the very unfortunate 13.
Secrecy
For security reasons, still reported by the most famous newspaper in New York, the location of the event was kept secret until the day before; the guests, it should be noted, had received an invitation to take part in a social event with an unspecified "senior Chinese leader".
Although he had been invited nine months earlier, Xi only confirmed his presence at the last minute.
Controversy
But, as Reuters explained inanother launch , such confidentiality was also due to the controversies that accompanied an initiative that urged people to spend a couple of happy hours with the head of a regime that locks up Uyghurs in concentration camps, keeps under a heel Hong Kong and threatens to invade a US partner like Taiwan.
In particular, it was the Republican Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on China Mike Gallagher who defined the price paid by the guests to sit at the table with a dictator as "unreasonable". Last Monday, Gallagher wrote a letter to the organizers asking them to reveal the secret guest list.
Who was at the event with Xi
But we had to wait until the end of the event to discover the obvious, namely that the elite of the stars and stripes industry sat down at those tables, happy to participate in the Sino-American thaw long awaited by those US companies that they still look at China as an indispensable market.
It was Newsweek that put the names of most of the participants in black and white, which we list below also drawing on the reports of the Financial Times , Bloomberg and CNBC :
- Gina Raimondo, US Secretary of Commerce
- Wang Wentao, Minister of Commerce China
- Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to China
- Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock
- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group
- Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates
- Stanley Deal, CEO of Boeing
- Merit Janow, former Dean of Columbia University
- Milind Pant, CEO of Amway
- Darius Adamcyzk, president and former CEO of Honeywell
- Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom
- Robert Goldstein, COO of BlackRock
- Joseph Bae, co-CEO of KKR
- Daniel O'Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences
- Ming Hsieh, managing director of Fulgent Genetic
- Marc Benjof, CEO of Salesforce
- Raj Subramjaman, CEO of FedEx
- Ryan Mcinermey, CEO of Visa
- Merit Janow, president of Mastercard
He was there too
A case in itself, the US newspapers underline, was that of the owner of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk, who attended Xi's speech but did not join the dinner with the other guests.
According to what Bloomberg reported, citing a post on the Chinese social network Weibo, "Musk expressed gratitude and praised the rapid growth of China's new energy vehicle sector", underlining how this year marks the tenth anniversary of Tesla's arrival in that country where Today, among other things, that factory in Shanghai operates which, Musk added, "has become a crucial hub for production and exports for Tesla".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/xi-jinping-cena-san-francisco/ on Fri, 17 Nov 2023 08:32:11 +0000.