If there was a secret meeting of high profile tech CEOs — including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google’s Larry Page — whose top agenda was to stop Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, Elon Musk says he was not involved.
The Huffington Post reported Monday that all three CEOs and a slew of other recognizable tech names met with Congressional leaders from House Speaker Paul Ryan to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to devise some sort of technocratic plot to thwart Trump’s populist rise in the Republican primary race.
Supposedly this devious plot, like something out of a Bond movie, took place at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum on an island resort off the coast of Georgia.
But Musk is disputing the report, confirming that he was there but denying he had anything to do with this alleged Trump business.
“The AEI meeting wasn’t secret and I was only there for a few hours to talk about Mars and sustainable energy. Nothing to do with Trump,” Musk tweeted Wednesday. When a follower asked if Musk supported Trump, the Tesla and Space X CEO simply responded, “no.”
Assuming Musk isn’t lying, his statement doesn’t refute that there was such a meeting, only that he wasn’t involved. And while it’s true AEI isn’t a secret meeting (it is an annual event after all), there are many secretive things about it. The whole event is off record to journalists and an attendee list was only discovered through Federal Aviation Administration records for private jets.
The nature of the meeting is unsettling even if Trump wasn’t a topic of discussion, but if the report is true, it likely only stands to benefit the Republican presidential hopeful.
Trump’s whole popularity largely hinges on being an outsider and standing up to the establishment figures in the party, so what better way to promote that image than the idea of The League of Tech Giants and Congressional Power Brokers teaming up against their mortal enemy? It makes billionaire Trump look like the underdog, and everyone loves an underdog.