Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and President Donald Trump aren’t exactly the best of friends, but that didn’t stop the White House from including the world’s richest individual on a list of industry leaders working with Trump to bring about a “Great American Economic Revival.”
Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson are among the members of industry groups that were created this week to address the economic impacts of the coronavirus outbreak, the White House said in a Tuesday night statement.
Nadella and Bezos are on the tech group, alongside the CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Salesforce and other leading companies. Johnson is listed with a different group, focusing on the food and beverage industry.
There are more than 200 representatives in all on sector-specific teams, ranging from health care industry executives to sports executives and “thought leaders” including trickle-down economist Art Laffer.
“These bipartisan groups of American leaders will work together with the White House to chart the path forward toward a future of unparalleled American prosperity,” the White House said.
Bezos is an interesting case, due to his longstanding frictions with Trump. The president has mocked the billionaire as “Jeff Bozo” and called the newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, a “propaganda machine for Amazon.” After weathering one pre-election barrage of criticism, Bezos joked that he’d be willing to give Trump a ride to space, courtesy of his Blue Origin space venture.
There were hints that Bezos’ status as a member of the revival team was in flux on Tuesday: He was initially listed as part of the retail industry group, but moved over to the tech industry group on the White House’s updated list.
Another interesting case is Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. Back in 2017, Musk left the White House’s advisory councils due to his disagreement with Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. “Climate change is real,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
This week, however, Musk was listed as a member of the White House’s manufacturing industry group, alongside executives from Ford, GM, Fiat Chrysler and other companies. (For what it’s worth, Boeing isn’t represented on the list, although Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are.)
Trump chatted with the groups’ members during a series of conference calls today, and the top item on the agenda was discussing the process for revving up the nation’s economy after the setbacks caused by the global coronavirus outbreak.
The president reportedly has been pressing for stay-at-home guidelines to be eased by early May. Last weekend, Trump said determining the timing for lifting restrictions on mobility would be “the toughest decision I ever made,” even though he later acknowledged that the state-by-state decisions were actually up to the nation’s governors.
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Today’s first teleconference was scheduled with executives from the banking, financial services, food and beverage, hospitality and retail industry groups. After that session, The Wall Street Journal reported that the executives told Trump that the administration needed to increase the availability of coronavirus testing dramatically before the public would be confident enough to return to workplaces, stores and restaurants. The Journal based its report on accounts from unnamed sources who were knowledgeable about the session.
During this afternoon’s White House coronavirus briefing, Trump said the executives provided “extremely productive feedback on how to safely reboot our economy.”
“We spoke to a lot of very, very smart people, the highest of the high tech,” Trump said, without naming names. “The level of IQ on some of those calls was about the highest you’ve ever seen on a phone call, that I can tell you.”
Trump said revised guidelines for social distancing and other restrictions would be announced at a news conference on Thursday. He and other officials signaled that the recommendations might vary on a state-by-state basis, depending on how many COVID-19 cases have been reported.
“We think some of the states can actually open up before the deadline of May 1,” Trump said. “I think that will be a very exciting time, indeed. Governors are looking forward to it, they’re chomping at the bit to get going.”
Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, noted that nine states have reported fewer than 1,000 cases of COVID-19. According to Johns Hopkins University’s authoritative COVID-19 dashboard, those nine states are Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.
