In an announcement last Friday, December 2, US President-Elect Donald Trump failed to include Tesla CEO and co-founder Elon Musk among the members of his Strategic and Policy Forum.
Starting on his attempt to generate economic growth and create more jobs for the people, Trump, made public his team of business advisers. The forum will be chaired by the CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman.
Among the sixteen members on the list are Disney Chairman and CEO Bob Iger, CEO of Cleveland Clinic Toby Cosgrove; Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co Jamie Dimon, and Chairman, President and CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty. Absent from the roster, however, is Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and Co-Founder.
Musk is well known among the manufacturing sector; New York Times’ Andrew Sorkin credits him as being responsible for envisioning the “re-emergance of manufacturing in the United Stated en masse.”
Sorkin writes further that the CEO has supplied approximately 35,000 jobs to workers thanks to his many businesses and is set to create 6,500 more in four years with his Tesla Gigafactory. In addition, automotive Tesla parts will be made locally in the country which will not only encourage competition, but innovation in the industry as well.
However, Musk may have been ignored for reasons that his critics call “a corporate governmental mess.” Subsidies being offered to his companies may represent the very things Trump wants to remove and do away with, writes Sorkin.
According to Trump, the Forum’s members will be advising him on how to improve the country’s productivity, job creation, and economic growth all from the vantage points of their diverse fields. It remains to be seen whether or not he will eventually invite Musk to the team, but as of the moment, the list of members stand and are scheduled to meet on the first week of February.
