Although some of President-elect Trump’s staff appointments seem questionable, it looks like Silicon Valley won’t be left entirely in the cold.
Trump announced that he has added Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to his Strategic and Policy Forum, which comprises of business leaders who will advise him on economic affairs.
Kalanick and Musk are interesting choices, given that the Forum mainly includes heads of more traditional firms, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wal-Mart, PepsiCo and General Electric.
Plus, neither of them can be described as ardent Trump fans: In November, Musk said that Trump was “not the right guy” for the presidency, and last October, Kalanick said, “Oh my god, Donald Trump’s gonna win. I’m going to move to China if Donald Trump wins.”
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It’s worth noting that Musk has previously worked with Trump transition team member Peter Thiel. The duo co-founded PayPal back in December 1998.
Musk also attended a meeting in New York hosted by Trump for face-time with a number of major tech head honchos, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
It’ll be interesting to see if the appointments allow Uber and Tesla to sway the Trump administration towards enabling legislation for things like self-driving cars and increased support for electric vehicles.
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