NEWS

A group of powerful business leaders gathered to meet with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in late February, seeking reassurance that President Donald Trump could be dissuaded from following through on his promise to impose tariffs on trillions of dollars in imports.

Instead, Lutnick arrived at the former Trump hotel in Washington with a very different message.

According to four people familiar with the event, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions, Lutnick rebuked the group, which included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Nasdaq CEO Adena T. Friedman and Target CEO Brian Cornell. Lutnick said the executives should wake up every morning thinking about how they can support the country, two of the people familiar with the conversation said. And he made clear that Trump would forge ahead with plans to transform the global economy.

“It was … a shot across the bow that this is the direction the president is going and to take him seriously,” one of the people said. Or, as another attendee summed it up: “Time to get on board with MAGA.”

The first months of Trump’s second term have posed unexpected challenges for many corporate leaders. Executives who had soured on President Joe Biden’s administration largely expressed optimism when Trump took office, suggesting the new White House would be better for business.

But Trump’s erratic tariff strategy, erosions in stock markets, a dip in consumer confidence and warnings from economists about risks of recession have stirred doubts in the corporate suite. Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks — just as law firms, universities and others institutions have.

“What good would it do if they said anything?” said investor Mark Cuban, who supported Vice President Kamala Harris in last year’s campaign. “There is no upside.”

Cuban said Biden was “really dumb” for not meeting with CEOs, and that Trump, in contrast, has been far more strategic in his face-to-face sessions with business leaders. CEOs and top executives often complained that they lacked a direct line to Biden, and criticized his administration’s efforts to raise taxes on large companies, its support for organized labor and its increased antitrust scrutiny of mergers. Tech, in particular, moved to show Trump that they wanted a fresh start this year, with leaders from Amazon, Meta, Google and others attending his inauguration.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is “the most open and accessible” president to date.

“He has met with many business leaders across various industries and makes firm decisions in the best interest of the American worker, American companies, and our country as a whole,” she said. “Every American business leader — from Main Street to Wall Street — is better off under the leadership of President Trump.”

Now executives are taking a cautious approach with the White House, with some giving the president credit for major domestic investments — a key goal of his tariff strategy — even for deals long in the works.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who received an exemption from the tariffs Trump imposed on China during his first term, met with the president in February. Afterward, Apple said it would spend $500 billion in the United States over the next four years, though much of that investment was already planned.

Whatever tariffs Trump announces Wednesday, financial sector executives aren’t expected to publicly react strongly, emphasizing a long view of Trump’s economic policies instead of pushing back at every turn, said one banking lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Most executives are trying to avoid one-on-one meetings with Trump and other administration officials, seeing strength in numbers, said one person in close communication with several executives. And CEOs are strategizing ahead of those small gatherings, another person said, in hopes of avoiding “a Zelensky moment” — a reference to Trump’s heated Oval Office exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February.

In early March, the CEOs of IBM, Intel, Dell and other top IT companies traveled to the White House to meet with Trump, Lutnick and other top advisers, including the billionaire tech executive Elon Musk, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Trump was planning to implement tariffs on semiconductors that could raise costs for their companies, and he had threatened to kill the CHIPS and Science Act, which has funneled billions of federal dollars to the tech sector since Biden signed it into law.

Ahead of the meeting, the executives agreed to keep the tone friendly and not start a fight. And they prepared a 30-page report about how modernizing government IT and using artificial intelligence could save American taxpayers an estimated $2 trillion over the next decade — a goal of Musk’s budget-cutting effort, the U.S. DOGE Service.

During the meeting, the CHIPS Act never came up by name, the people said, though the executives mentioned the need to maximize investment to ensure that the United States was reindustrializing. They also noted that tariffs could drive up the price of electronics, particularly in the short term, because it would take several years to build fabrication plants to make semiconductors domestically.

Bruce Mehlman, executive director of the Technology CEO Council, the advocacy organization that coordinated the meeting, said in a statement that it was “a positive and constructive dialogue on how best to maintain American high tech leadership and catalyze more investment in the U.S.”

Mehlman added: “The CEOs agreed to continue sharing ideas and information and to reconvene in the months ahead.”

Trump, too, has sought to ease tensions during some visits. During a White House meeting in late March with executives in the oil and gas industry, Trump suggested that he might exempt the energy sector from new tariffs, according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump asked if that would make the executives happy, the people said. One person briefed on the matter said it was not totally clear if the president was joking or making a serious policy commitment.

(Lutnick appeared to try for a joke, too, in his meeting with business leaders at the former Trump hotel, remarking that he and Trump met chasing the same women in New York City — a comment that struck some attendees as off-color, people familiar with the episode said.)

The pharmaceutical industry also has sought to raise its concerns about tariffs with lawmakers and officials at every level of the administration, including in a meeting with Trump at the White House in February, according to a person familiar with the meetings.

“We’re really worried about the tariffs,” the person said, adding that they “are running contrary to some of the better signals from the administration,” including Trump’s vow to roll back regulations. “Ultimately, if [the tariffs] are punitive enough, they run the risk of erasing the other opportunities.”

PhRMA, an industry group whose members include Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson, has told the administration that it shares the goal of expanding manufacturing in the United States. The companies have sought to present a united front, warning that it takes years to assemble the highly technical plants needed to make drugs. They also have emphasized to Trump officials that broad tariffs could limit American access to cutting-edge drugs.

However, “whatever meetings we’ve had to date have not led to us feeling certain that there’s not going to be tariffs imposed on medicines,” the person said. “We still have advocacy challenges ahead.”

Trump has a long history of singling out perceived corporate opponents. It happened so frequently on the campaign trail and in Trump’s first administration that the Wall Street Journal launched the “Trump Target Index” in 2017, tracking the impact of the president’s critical tweets on the stock prices of a dozen companies, including Nordstrom, Amazon and Lockheed Martin. Some business leaders were among his most prominent critics, dropping off White House industry advisory councils after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords and said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a clash between white supremacists and protesters in Charlottesville.

So far in his second term, some tech leaders — who often had rocky relations with Trump in his first administration — have sought to build better ties.

In his first term, the president frequently criticized Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, on Twitter. This time around, Bezos visited Mar-a-Lago after the election and attended Trump’s inauguration. He also dined with Trump on Feb. 26, Trump told the Spectator magazine, which was the same day Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinions section would make changes to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”

Last month, Trump praised Bezos’s changes at The Post in an interview with the Fox-owned publication Outkick, saying that Bezos is “trying to be more fair.”

On X, Bezos wrote that Trump’s tariffs would be “a very reasonable topic for the new opinion page to explore,” along with “critical issues around reciprocity, national security, and the damaging and distorting effects if tariffs are used to pick winners and losers. ”

A person close to the Amazon founder, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, said: “Jeff thinks Lutnick is smart.”

Two other big tech companies have sought to preempt legal battles with Trump. Meta and X recently settled lawsuits challenging their decisions to suspend Trump’s social media accounts in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, agreeing to donate millions to the fund for his presidential library.

X, which Musk bought in 2022, agreed in February to pay $10 million in exchange for Trump dropping the lawsuit.

“I was looking to get much more money than that,” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a joint interview with Musk in February. “He got a big discount.”