A dozen American business leaders are facing criticism after attending the swanky $40,000-per-seat gala hosted by President Joe Biden in San Francisco with Chinese President Xi Jinping as “guest of honor.”
Top leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting dinner with Xi included Apple’s Tim Cook and Boeing Executive Vice President Stanley Deal.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and According to multiple reports, he left before dinner started.
Musk was not on the list of company attendees and representatives at the gala, according to a schedule of the event obtained by DailyMail.com.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also greeted Xi during cocktail hour but did not stay for dinner.
Also not on the program, but present at Wednesday evening’s expensive dinner, were executives from Pfizer, Nike and FedEx. Former California Governor Jerry Brown also paid the premium to attend.
The soiree was held at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, California and had a price tag of $40,000 per seat.
Many US business leaders, including Apple’s Tim Cook (pictured), attended the $40,000-per-head soiree on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco on Wednesday evening. The dinner included remarks from Chinese President Xi Jinping
Other privately held corporate executives who attended the dinner included executives at Nike, Pfizer and FedEx. Elon Musk stopped by for cocktail hour to chat with Xi, but didn’t stay for dinner
The ballroom contained 34 rose- and orchid-laden tables, but they were numbered 1 through 39 to skip number 13, as well as any number with a four, since that resembles the word “death” in Chinese.
Guests had the choice of a Black Angus steak with coffee crust or a vegetable curry with jasmine rice and roasted pistachios. notes the New York Times.
Biden’s team is really rolling out the red carpet for Xi and other APEC leaders.
The welcome reception for the summit included a musical performance by Gwen Stefani and a moment when Biden welcomed California Governor Gavin Newsom to the stage.
Musk’s action comes on the same night he was forced to walk back an earlier endorsement of an anti-Semitic post in which he wrote, “You said the actual truth.”
Two hours later, he made it clear that calls for “a Jewish genocide” were “unacceptable to any reasonable person.”
Xi, the leader of a country considered America’s biggest rival, delivered more than half an hour of remarks at the dinner, as a room of more than 300 executives and officials listened attentively.
The CCP leader was introduced by Evan Greenberg, CEO of Chubb Insurance.
Xi assured that there was an enduring friendship between the US and China that could not be overlooked amid the recent turmoil – especially rising tensions over the CCP pushing its claim to the independent island of Taiwan.
The dinner takes place on the sidelines of the APEC summit, an annual gathering of 21 Pacific nations that account for about half of all global trade.
Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo spoke at the dinner and offered thanks. Xi for a productive meeting earlier on Tuesday when Chinese officials gathered with Biden and his deputies.
“We were not going to resolve all the military tensions between their military and ours here in a four-hour meeting,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday on Good Morning America when asked about the progress made during the meetings that day. prior.
Xi delivered half-hour remarks at the soiree, where the dictator was listed as a “guest of honor.”
The welcome reception for APEC on Wednesday included a musical performance by Gwen Stefani
Stefani hugs President Joe Biden during the APEC summit
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo also spoke to about 300 executives and officials at the dinner
The Chinese Communist Party’s House Select Committee released images of the Wednesday evening event program, along with the post: ‘List of elite US executives who dined with genocidal communist ‘Guest of Honor’ Xi Jinping for $40,000 in San Francisco last night. ‘
‘Enemies of the state!’ Lawyer and self-proclaimed ‘Deep State Marauder’ Ivan Raiklin wrote in response to the post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He urged House Speaker Mike Johnson to subpoena and order the arrest of business leaders “for aiding and abetting America’s existential threat.”
Representatives of corporate sponsors at the scheduled dinner included: Apple CEO Tim Cook; Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone; CEO of BlackRock asset management firm Larry Fink; Boeing’s executive vice president Stanley Deal; Mastercard Chairman Merit Janow; CEO Milind Pant of health and beauty multi-level marketing company Amway; Darius Adamczyk, executive chairman of Honeywell; semiconductor and infrastructure software company Broadcom’s president and CEO Hock Tan; Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands casino and resort Robert Goldstein; Joseph Bae, co-CEO of KKR Investment; Chairman and CEO of Gilead Sciences Daniel O’Day; and Fulgent Genetics Chairman and CEO Ming Hsieh.
‘The most important question for us is: are we adversaries or partners?’ Xi asked during his remarks.
“China is ready to be a partner and friend of the United States,” he assured, explaining that seeing each other as competitors would lead to ill-informed policies.
But the American public isn’t convinced: One
Pictured: President Joe Biden, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul Pelosi attend a welcome reception for leaders attending the APEC Summit in California
Xi spoke on a number of light-hearted topics such as ping pong and pandas – after the pandas at the National Zoo were flown back to China, ending in another sign of the US’s deteriorating relations with the communist regime after more than fifty years.
But the dictator also spoke about how Americans and Chinese worked together against the Japanese during World War II.
Stephen Orlins is chairman of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, one of the groups that sponsored Wednesday’s event. He noted, according to the Times, that Xi had prepared three versions of his speech for Wednesday’s soiree.
After the events with President Biden earlier in the day, Xi had chosen the friendliest.