President-elect Donald Trump is beefing up his cadre of CEO-advisors: the incoming commander-in-chief said Wednesday that he is adding three more of America's most prominent chief executives to an economic forum dedicated to job creation and productivity.
The Trump transition team announced Wednesday that the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum is adding to its ranks Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, and
“America has the most innovative and vibrant companies in the world, and the pioneering CEOs joining this Forum today are at the top of their fields,” Trump said in a statement Wednesday morning. “My administration is going to work together with the private sector to improve the business climate and make it attractive for firms to create new jobs across the United States from Silicon Valley to the heartland.”
The addition of Musk and Nooyi to the forum is especially notable, as both chief executives have criticized the president-elect and or his campaign season rhetoric in the recent past.
“I think a bit strongly that [Trump] is probably not the right guy” for the presidency, and that "he doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States," Musk told CNBC during an interview on November 4.
Speaking at the Dealbook conference in New York two days after the election, Nooyi, who had supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, joked about needing a box of tissues and went on to denounce the overtly misogynistic tone to things that Trump said on the campaign trail and in his life as a private citizen -- including the comments he made in 2005 about grabbing women by their crotches and using his celebrity status to sleep with them.
"How dare we talk about women that way? Why do we talk that way about a whole group of citizens? I don't think there's a place for that kind of language in any part of society. Not in locker rooms, not in football players' homes, not in any place," Nooyi said at the time, appearing to allude to Trump's "it was locker room talk" excuse for his 2005 remarks.
Criticism aside, the insight of the three new members will be valuable on a number of fronts: the initial 16-person list of forum members included just two women (Barra and
Rometty has already taken a particularly active role in promoting her ideas for job growth in 2017 and beyond: in an open letter to the president-elect posted online one week after the election, she outlined the need for what she calls "new collar" jobs -- technical support jobs that don't require a four-year college degree but rather vocational training or a combination of community college and professional mentoring. Rometty reiterated this position in a Tuesday evening op-ed in USA Today. She went on to say that IBM will do its part to fill these types of jobs by hiring 25,000 people and investing $1 billion in employees over the next four years.
