Trump will hold meeting with tech leaders next week

President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly holding a roundtable summit with tech industry leaders on December 14th in New York City. USA Today reports that the invitation came from chief of staff Reince Priebus; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and transition team member Peter Thiel, who is also a Silicon Valley investor, entrepreneur, and Facebook board member. We don’t know exactly who was invited, or who will be attending, although major tech companies like Google and Microsoft had a significant lobbying presence under the Obama administration.

Trump has taken positions at odds with those of many tech companies. He’s gone after Apple for manufacturing phones overseas, and for refusing to unlock one of the San Bernardino shooters’ iPhones earlier this year. His FCC is expected to be anti-net neutrality, and his overall views on privacy and security recently prompted the Internet Archive to start work on a backup outside the US. Nonetheless, tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have expressed willingness to work with Trump, and Thiel will likely serve as an intermediary — even if his public Trump support before the election made him an outlier in Silicon Valley.