In its approximately 950 years of existence, the Windsor Castle has witnessed History. It has served as a royal refuge (during World War II) and also as a prison for a king who was to be executed. But never, until this Wednesday night, had it hosted such wealth and technological development capacity as when the leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States sat down to dine alongside a large part of Silicon Valley and Wall Street's top brass. It is a stark contrast to the dinner in Windsor during Barack Obama's visit in 2011, where Hollywood celebrities predominated, such as film director Tim Burton, actor Tom Hanks, and actress Helena Bonham Carter.
This Wednesday, tech entrepreneurs set the tone at a dinner consisting of watercress panna cotta, quail egg salad, chicken, and vanilla ice cream. Keir Starmer, who does not eat meat, opted for turbot. Enjoying these dishes and drinking a 1945 port wine after dinner (in honor of the year of Donald Trump's birth), a 1912 champagne (the year of the president's mother's birth in Scotland), and a 2002 whiskey (in honor of Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee), were Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Tim Cook (Apple), whose three companies together are worth approximately double - 9.6 trillion euros - the top 100 companies on the London Stock Exchange.
Also in attendance was Safra Katz, CEO of Oracle, representing her boss Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of the company and, for a few hours last week, the richest person in the world, with a fortune that yesterday reached 308 billion euros. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the world leader in artificial intelligence and the unicorn - meaning the newly created company not listed on the stock exchange and valued at over a billion dollars - with a valuation of 422 billion dollars, double that of the German SAP, the most valuable European company.
This display of business power was what Keir Starmer wanted, even though a sector of the left of the Labour Party shudders at seeing their prime minister with what they call "the oligarchy." There is no doubt that those dining in Windsor are on Trump's side, although many of them - like Cook, Nadella, Altman, and perhaps Huang - the closeness is not due to ideology but to fear of reprisals from a president who has decided to subject large companies to political control. The best example was Cook, who in the 2016 campaign, when Trump ran for President for the first time, refused to have Apple provide any devices to the campaign (because in the US, large companies 'donate' equipment to presidential candidates, a practice that is undoubtedly purely humanitarian and not aimed at 'buying' future favors). Since then, Cook has become friends with Trump, even giving him a gold plaque in the Oval Office. The result was seen last night in Windsor, where the head of Apple was seated just three seats away from the president.
Others, however, are friends with Trump, like financier Steven Schwarzman, from the world's largest private equity fund (also known as a "vulture fund"), Blackstone, owner of thousands of apartments in Spain. The same can be said of Katz's boss, Ellison, who has embarked on the acquisition of digital platforms (TikTok), film studios (Paramount), television networks (CBS, CNN, Discovery), and websites (The Free Press), with the clear intention of creating a multimedia and social media empire loyal to the president. Ellison has also made gigantic donations to the technological research centers at the University of Oxford, which he is partly shaping in line with the criteria of major educational institutions in the United States.
More sad is Schwarzman's case, as the Southern Water company has prohibited him from continuing to connect his trucks to local pipelines to fill the artificial lake on his 95 million euro estate in Wiltshire, about 70 kilometers from Windsor, due to drought. If people cannot water their gardens due to rationing, it is not appropriate for him to create a lake right now on his 1,012 hectares of land, for which he has already clashed with British authorities on environmental grounds on several occasions.
The dinner was also a public display that in politics and business, appearances matter a lot. The best example (even better than Cook's) was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whom many believe Trump owes his second presidency to, thanks to the favorable treatment he has received from his Fox News television network. On July 18, however, Trump sued Murdoch for 8.5 billion euros after one of his newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, reported that the president had congratulated pimp Jeffrey Epstein on his 50th anniversary with a dedication and a drawing of a naked woman. The information was true, but the lawsuit continues. And the 8.5 billion from the lawsuit did not prevent Trump and Murdoch from sharing dinner yesterday. At 95 years old, the 'news owner' - as titled in the unauthorized biography about him written by journalist Stephen Wolf - was in Windsor, after resolving a fierce battle among his three sons to divide the patriarch's media empire once he is no longer here.
All of them were in Windsor this Wednesday because they are investing in the United Kingdom. Google opened a new data center in the country on Tuesday and has committed to investing another 5.7 billion in the next two years, although these promises, like those of politicians during campaigns, are made to not be fulfilled. In any case, that figure is minuscule when compared to the 32 billion promised by Microsoft until 2029 or the 13 billion from a consortium led by Nvidia.
All these figures, along with the leaders of British companies, literally dined at the same table as Charles III, Starmer, and Trump. The monarch and the president celebrated the friendship between the United States and the United Kingdom, and Charles III allowed himself a brief entry into current politics when, celebrating the recent trade agreement between his country and the US, he said that "without a doubt, there can be more." Subtly, the king also made some requests to Trump. Thus, he praised the defense pact between the UK, Australia, and the US known as AUKUS, which the Pentagon, within its ultranationalist policy, threatens to dissolve. He mentioned Ukraine but not Gaza, a thorny issue not only in the bilateral relationship but also within the UK itself. Charles III even made a joke about Trump's two golf courses when he said, "I understand that British soil is excellent for making golf courses."
Trump - who, as the king recalled, is visiting the UK for the second consecutive month - also showed his friendlier side. His style, unlike that of Charles III, is far from impeccable, but that did not prevent the US president from uttering the perfect headline for the British press: "The United Kingdom and the United States are two notes of the same chord."
With any other US president, that statement would have been a confirmation of the romance between London and Washington. Trump, who has made 'America first' his slogan, had never shown such closeness to a country. It's not just Trump. His vice president and potential successor, JD Vance, was on vacation in the British Isles in August. And the business display in Windsor was as significant as a fleet of aircraft carriers. But, with Trump, you never know. What is clear is that Keir Starmer's effort to seduce the President of the United States is, at least for the moment, working.