The combined net worth of the tech executives expected to attend US President Donald Trump's private dinner Thursday night with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, is around $2 trillion , underscoring the staggering wealth and political influence of the small group of moguls poised to profit immensely from rapid developments in…
Page F2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 24 September 2026
Men who warn AI could end humanity dine with Trump and Xi, worth $2.2 trillion combined
As it ran on the front
Three in four Americans tell CNN's pollsters they are afraid of artificial intelligence, a number The Hill ran September 24 under the flat headline "75 percent fearful, concerned about AI." That fear did not arrive on its own. Blood in the Machine's newsletter said the quiet part out loud this week: the extinction narrative is winning, and it happens to mint trillion-dollar companies along the way.
Trace the calendar. On September 18, the Washington Examiner reported that OpenAI's Sam Altman, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and other AI leaders would attend Trump's state dinner for Xi Jinping, the paper noting the summit would put "AI and the growing U.S.-China technology rivalry in focus." The next day, the New York Post confirmed the guest list ran deeper: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk had scored invitations too, alongside Google's Sundar Pichai, Dell's Michael Dell, and Citigroup's Jane Fraser — what the Post called "the hottest ticket in town." By September 21, The Hill was reporting that "apocalyptic warnings about the danger of uncontrolled artificial intelligence" were shaping the Trump-Xi agenda itself, even as Trump publicly dismissed those same warnings.…
…(cont) Then came September 24 — the same day the fear poll ran — when Common Dreams totaled what the dinner guests were actually worth: $2.2 trillion, combined, across Musk, Altman, Huang, Zuckerberg, Pichai and Nadella. The White House released the dinner menu. It released no record of what was discussed.
Line up what the wire shows, in order. A poll finds a public frightened of a technology. A newsletter notes that fright is profitable for the people building it. A guest list confirms those people sat down with the two men who run the two governments most likely to decide whether that technology gets regulated at all. And the combined net worth of that guest list landed at $2.2 trillion, published the same day the fear number ran.
No motive needs inventing; the receipts already run in sequence. The men telling a frightened public that their product could end the species are the same men whose seat at that table depends on being believed the only ones capable of building it safely. Take away the fear number and the dinner is just a dinner. Take away the dinner and the fear number is just a poll. Sitting together, in the order the wire filed them, they are a market.
The menu is public. The agenda is not. Neither is the bill for whatever gets built next, or who gets asked to pay it once the table is cleared.
“Follow the con from the poll to the place cards: they spend months telling you the machine might kill everybody, then they walk it into a state dinner and let that fear set the price of admission. Nobody's lying about being scared — the poll's real — it's just that the scared feeling is the product now, and the men selling it are the ones getting seated next to the president. When the only people allowed to say "trust us" are the ones who profit every time you don't, that's not a safety plan, that's a toll booth.”
“Look, these are the leading experts, of course they get invited to discuss the technology they built — who else would you seat there, a poll respondent? The dinner's about the U.S.-China relationship, the AI stuff is incidental, it's just — okay, six of the richest men alive who all run AI companies happened to be the ones invited to the AI-adjacent summit. That's a coincidence. A big one. Moving on.”
The receipts
NVIDIA President Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser are also invited.
{beacon} Technology Technology The Big Story AI fears hit Trump-Xi agenda, but challenges abound Apocalyptic warnings about the danger of uncontrolled artificial intelligence are adding new urgency to talks between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping set for later this week. © Brendan Smialowski/Pool Photo via AP, File Trump…
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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.