Trump has met with 81 executives since being elected president — here’s who made the cut

Skye Gould/Business Insider

President Donald Trump has prioritized building relationships with CEOs in his first 100 days.

One of the main reasons Donald Trump won the presidency is because he convinced enough Americans that their country needed a successful businessperson at the helm, someone who knows how to make lucrative deals and who lacked political baggage.

The first 100 days in the White House have been an adjustment for Trump, who’s never held elected office. However, during this transition he’s regularly put himself in his element, talking business at tables full of executives.

He started holding these executive discussions shortly after he was elected in November, and invited some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names to Trump Tower in December. For his first large meeting as president, he chose to sit down with a group of prominent American CEOs including SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk, Ford’s Mark Fields, and Lockheed Martin’s Marillyn Hewson.

Since his election, Trump has met with 81 executives to hear their thoughts on regulation, manufacturing, and trade. Looking at who the president has chosen to meet with offers insight into the direction he wants to take the country, as well as how he leads.

Skye Gould/Business Insider

Tech

• One of Trump’s most vocal supporters during his campaign was billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and the cofounder and chairman of Palantir, a big data analysis company that has worked with US intelligence and defense. Thiel served as Trump’s bridge to Silicon Valley, a sector from which many prominent names opposed him during the campaign.

• Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick resigned from Trump’s business advisory council in February after facing pressure from his employees and customers.

• Trump has invited Elon Musk to multiple meetings, and Musk’s companies have benefited from billions of dollars in government subsidies under President Barack Obama.

• Dozens of tech leaders publicly condemned Trump’s initial immigration ban in February.

• Trump signed two executive orders to promote STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education among young women, an initiative brought up by these tech leaders.

• Tech leaders want an improved H1-B visa process, to recruit and retain foreign talent.

Retail

• Trump told heads of retail that tax reform would be the best opportunity to help their businesses. In February he held a meeting with eight representatives of the Retail Industry Leaders Association.

• Retail executives have been most vocally against the proposal of a “border tax” on imported goods, since their businesses survive on imports.

• Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly circulated a flyer throughout Capitol Hill that stated a 20% import tax would lose billions of dollars for his company, and that foreign companies like Alibaba would be able to undercut it through direct online sales.

Manufacturing

• Trump has promised to remain true to his “America First” campaign promise by increasing manufacturing in the US. And in his first speech to a join session of Congress, in March, Trump formally announced that he wants to pursue a $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan.

• One of Trump’s first acts after his election was negotiating with United Technologies CEO Greg Hayes to keep 700 Carrier jobs in the US in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks.

• The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that a net of approximately 5 million American manufacturing jobs were lost between 2000 and 2010.

• Trump declared that the Keystone and Dakota Access oil pipelines have to be created with American steel.

Finance

• Trump has many more friends on Wall Street these days. He chose private equity king Steve Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, to chair his primary business council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, and has heavily pursued deregulation.

• JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is also the chairman of the independent group the Business Roundtable, and he and its members have said they increased hiring and spending due to a favorable view of Trump’s pro-business policies.

• Trump is poised to roll back key regulation laws, including large components of the Dodd-Frank law passed in the wake of the Great Recession.

Pharmaceutical

• Ahead of his inauguration, Trump said pharmaceutical companies were “getting away with murder” with their high prices.

• Trump proposed an increase in production of medicine and medical devices within the US.

• The president of big pharma lobbying group PhRMA, Steve Ubl, said that after meeting with Trump in January, he’s optimistic that the industry can create 350,000 American jobs over the next 10 years.

• Republicans pulled their proposal to overhaul the American healthcare system in late March, a plan that would have cut costs for pharmaceutical companies.

Defense

• Under Trump’s proposed budget, the federal government would increase defense spending by 9%, though the boost is not as large as the one he proposed in his campaign.

• Trump successfully had Lockheed Martin streamline spending on its F-35 fighter jet in development, according to Lockheed’s CEO Marillyn Hewson.

• The president plans on increasing the Navy’s number of ships and the Air Force’s combat planes.

Energy

• Trump said that his administration will be focused on lowering energy costs for Americans and decreasing dependence on foreign oil — but with a reversion to more traditional energy sources.

• Trump wants to see an increased use of shale oil and gas as well as other natural gas reserves, and wants to see a revival of the coal industry.

• He proposed that revenue from deals with energy companies would be redirected toward infrastructure payments.

Transportation

• During his campaign, Trump heavily criticized automobile manufacturers for building cars in Mexico. But when he met with the CEOs of “the Big Three” in January, he focused instead on incentives to keep more manufacturing within the US.

• Ford CEO Mark Fields said that he was happy with Trump’s decision to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he believed did not adequately address currency manipulation.

• Trump told the CEOs he would work with them to bring jobs specifically back to Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

• The Trump administration will be reviewing emissions regulations enacted under Obama.

• In March, Trump met with trucking industry CEOs to discuss health care. Truck driver is the most popular job in 29 states. After the meeting, Trump held a memorable photo opp in the driver’s seat of a big rig.

Small Banking

• Trump met with the heads of prominent community banks in March to address rolling back regulations in Dodd-Frank that were intended for big banks but inadvertently affected them.

• The heads of these banks informed the president of how the needs of rural and small town banks are very different from those of the national banks, and how regulations need to be tailored to them separately.

• Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former CEO and chairman of the small bank One West, said in his congressional confirmation hearing he would make the success of community banks a priority.

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