‘I’m Here to Help,’ Trump Tells Tech Executives at Meeting

The meeting between President-elect Donald J. Trump and the nation’s tech elite was hyped as something out of “The Apprentice”: The new boss tells his minions to shape up. It turned out to be a charm offensive, a kind of “Dancing With the Silicon Valley Stars.”

“This is a truly amazing group of people,” the president-elect said on Wednesday in a 25th-floor conference room at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The gathering included Jeff Bezos of Amazon; Elon Musk of Tesla; Timothy D. Cook of Apple; Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook; Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, among others. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” Mr. Trump said.

He kept going in that vein. “There’s nobody like you in the world,” he enthused. “In the world! There’s nobody like the people in this room.” Anything that the government “can do to help this go along,” he made clear, “we’re going to be there for you.”

And that was just in the first few minutes. The candidate who warned during the presidential campaign that Amazon was going to have antitrust problems, that Apple needed to build its iPhones in the United States instead of China, was nowhere to be seen.

Even after the press was ushered out, the meeting continued its genial way. Among the topics discussed, according to several corporate executives and a transition official briefed on the meeting, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, were vocational education and the need for more of it, the promise and peril of trade with China and immigration (Mr. Trump wants “smart and talented people here”). The president-elect also asked the executives to see if they could not apply data analysis technology to detect and help get rid of government waste.

There are plans for quarterly meetings of a smaller group of tech executives, to be organized by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, said one of the executives briefed on the meeting. They will focus mainly on immigration and education issues.

The meeting lasted more than 90 minutes, longer than expected. Mr. Trump was seated next to Peter Thiel, the tech investor who is a member of the president-elect’s transition team. In another sign of Mr. Trump mixing family, business and government hats, three of his adult children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — also attended.

“I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we’ve had asking to come to this meeting,” Mr. Trump told his guests. Everyone laughed.

To get to the 25th-floor conference room, the tech leaders entered the golden elevators of Trump Tower the same way anyone would — by punching a button. This gave the news media, cordoned off a few feet away, time to shout questions. None of the executives took the bait.

Neither did they talk on the way out, although by that time the building was being closed for Trump Tower’s holiday party. Safra Catz, the co-chief of Oracle who attended the meeting, gave a thumbs up.

Mr. Bezos later issued a statement that said he found the meeting “very productive.”

“I shared the view that the administration should make innovation one of its key pillars, which would create a huge number of jobs across the whole country, in all sectors, not just tech — agriculture, infrastructure, manufacturing — everywhere,” he said.

The technology world had been in turmoil as the meeting drew near. Some argued the chief executives should boycott the event to show their disdain for Mr. Trump’s values. Others maintained they should go and forthrightly make their values clear. And still others thought they should attend and make their accommodations with the new reality.

“There is a wide spectrum of feeling in the Valley,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud storage company Box.

Complicating the debate was the fact that the most fervently anti-Trump elements in Silicon Valley seem to be the start-ups and venture capitalists, few of which were invited to the meeting. (Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir Technologies, was the only head of a privately held tech company at the meeting.)

Some tech companies were also notable for their absence. Twitter, the president-elect’s medium of choice for communication, was not invited.

Twitter declined to comment on why it was not included. A campaign official complained last month in a Medium post that Twitter had killed a #CrookedHillary emoji. On Wednesday, Sean Spicer, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that Twitter had been left out of the meeting because of space considerations in a gathering that many other technology executives were “dying to get into.”

In the days and hours before the meeting, various factions made their positions clear.

A group of engineers and other tech workers issued a statement asserting that they would refuse to participate in the creation of databases that could be used by the government to target people based on their race, religion or national origin.

The proclamation immediately drew more than 500 signatories, including employees at Google, Apple and Microsoft. During the campaign, Mr. Trump did not rule out the idea of a database of Muslims.

Another group of entrepreneurs assembled virtually this week with the same goal of preventing any erosion of civil liberties.

They also accepted “a responsibility to partner with communities where the effects of rapidly changing technologies have hurt our fellow Americans.” Among those signing were Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist; Dave McClure, of the 500 Start-Ups incubator; and Lenny Mendonca, an angel investor.

Mr. Levie, of Box, was a Hillary Clinton supporter but believes in engagement with the new administration.

“We have to face reality that this is the next four years, and the best way to make sure our values are upheld is actually push on them,” he said.

Other tech chief executives also took the same route. Hours before Mr. Trump’s meeting with tech leaders, the president-elect announced that Mr. Musk and Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, would be among those joining his Strategic and Policy Forum, which is already stacked with businesspeople from finance and other industries. Ginni Rometty, the chief executive of IBM, had previously joined the forum.

More than values and policy are at stake in the relationship between the administration and the Valley. Money is, too.

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, Forrester Research is cutting back its growth estimate for the United States tech market in 2017 to 4.3 percent from 5.1 percent.

One reason is simple caution, as large multinational manufacturers navigate a new and unpredictable administration.

Another reason: less tech spending by the government. “There are so many cabinet secretaries who are explicitly hostile to the mission of their agencies,” said Andrew Bartels, a Forrester principal analyst.

As for 2018, there are so many ways things could go that a forecast is impossible. “It’s up for grabs,” the analyst said.

So, too, is the relationship of Mr. Trump and the tech industry. For the moment, though, Silicon Valley seems to have dodged a bullet.