The combined net worth of the tech executives expected to attend US President Donald Trump’s private dinner Thursday night with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, is around $2 trillion, underscoring the staggering wealth and political influence of the small group of moguls poised to profit immensely from rapid developments in artificial intelligence—which researchers and industry insiders say is a threat to humanity.

The dinner attendee list is expected to include Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Google CEO Sundar Pichai; and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. A Forbes analysis released earlier this week estimated that the tech executives are worth a combined $2.2 trillion.

The Trump White House has published the dinner menu for the event but has not released any details on what will be discussed on Thursday night. Given the expected guest list—and intensifying competition between the US and China on AI development—artificial intelligence is expected to be a major topic of discussion.

Earlier this week, during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Trump dismissed efforts to regulate AI and said he plans to “encourage” the technology, “not rein it in.”

US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who introduced legislation earlier this week that would ban AI superintelligence and pause advanced AI development, wrote in a social media post on Thursday that “the function of AI must be to improve life for all humanity, not just make a handful of billionaires even richer.”

Sanders pointed to the guest list for the Trump-Xi dinner and noted that the expected attendees “have nearly doubled their wealth since Trump’s election.”

Trump invited 10 Big Tech Oligarchs to his private dinner with President Xi of China.

They have nearly doubled their wealth since Trump’s election & are now worth almost $2 trillion. Here’s how much richer each of them got since Trump was elected:

Elon Musk: ⬆️ $658 billion…
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 24, 2026

Bloomberg reporter Jonathan Tamari argued that the Trump-Xi dinner shows how the US president has “treated Silicon Valley execs almost like an extension of his administration.”

Other executives expected to attend the dinner are Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Apple’s Tim Cook.

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