More than a dozen CEOs will accompany President Donald Trump to Beijing this week. More noteworthy than who’s making the trip is who isn’t.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was on an early draft of the White House’s invite list that Semafor reported on last week, won’t be there. The Trump administration has signaled that Huang was left off the list because chips aren’t on the formal agenda alongside the Boeings and the beans, but it’s worth noting that the fine line Nvidia is walking between the US and China has become a political liability that could distract from a trip that the White House is positioning foremost around relationship-building.
That’s why the folks coming along are generally viewed as neutral on China: Financial firms like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, industrials like GE, telecom companies like Qualcomm (though, curiously, not Cisco, whose CEO begged off, citing the company’s earnings release), and Apple, which remains reliant on China despite years of shifting production across Asia.
“Big American business is far from unanimous,” Semafor’s Ben Smith writes, and those with stickier agendas — notably, US automakers who desperately want to keep China out of the US — won’t be coming along.