NEW YORK CITY — A dozen or so technology executives filed into a room on the 25th floor of Trump Tower on Wednesday wearing suits not usually seen in Silicon Valley.

Their combined net worth – at least $136 billion – was gilded even for the likes of Trump Tower. After months of acrimony that at times felt personal, they had come to make nice with the president-elect.

And make nice they did.

As they went around the room introducing themselves one-by-one, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, once the target of President-elect Donald Trump’s attacks, said he was “super-excited to talk about innovation in this administration.” (Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post). Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was also “excited to talk about jobs.”

Donald Trump also was on his best behavior during the roughly two-hour meeting.

“This is a truly amazing group of people,” he said. “There’s nobody like you in the world. In the world. There’s nobody like the people in this room. And anything we can do to help this go along, and we’re going to be there for you.”

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But behind the cordiality was a sense of trepidation. Trump, both as candidate and president-elect, has used his perch to shame companies, and the consequences were severe.

When Trump tweeted earlier this month that he wanted to cancel Boeing’s $4 billion contract to build Air Force One, Boeing’s stock price took a hit.

Trump has targeted Apple and other companies for manufacturing their products in China, and has called to raise tariffs on Chinese goods, a crucial issue for Silicon Valley companies that import hardware components from China.

At the meeting, which included the leaders of Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Tesla, Trump seemed willing to back down from a signature campaign promise to end free trade deals.

“We’re going to make fair trade deals,” he told the executives. “We’re going to make it a lot easier for you to trade across borders.”

Last month, Trump negotiated with equipment maker Carrier to avoid losing 800 jobs to Mexico in exchange for $7 million in government subsidies. In the days leading up to the meeting, staff for the tech companies tried to parse whether the image-conscious Trump would try to use his leverage with them to do something similar.


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