President Donald Trump has invited executives from some of the biggest U.S. companies — including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg — to join his trip to China this week, according to a White House official.

Also expected to join Trump’s delegation for meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping are Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Coherent’s Jim Anderson, GE Aerospace’s H. Lawrence Culp Jr., Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon, Illumina’s Jacob Thaysen, Mastercard’s Michael Miebach, Meta Platforms executive Dina Powell McCormick, Micron Technology’s Sanjay Mehrotra, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon and Visa’s Ryan McInerney, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the list has not been announced.

A spokesperson for Cisco said CEO Chuck Robbins had been invited by the White House to join the trip but is unable to attend due to the company’s earnings schedule.

The executives will join Trump on the trip during which he has said he hopes to secure a series of business deals and purchase agreements with Beijing.

The summit agenda is expected to cover trade, artificial intelligence, export controls, Taiwan and the Iran war, with both sides entering the talks after weeks of escalating tensions.

Notably absent from the attendees is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang who said last week in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer that “We should let the president announce whatever he decides to announce … If invited, it would be a privilege, ​it would be a great honor to represent the United States.”

General Motors, Disney and Alphabet are also companies with interests in China that the White House did not list as having executives expected to attend.

On Friday Citigroup’s Fraser told CNBC’s Leslie Picker that “I think it’s very important to see engagement” between the two economic superpowers.” Adding, “we all need that engagement to be occurring.”

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink urged investors to resist the temptation to time markets, arguing that staying invested through periods of turmoil has historically delivered far stronger returns.

“Over time, staying invested has mattered far more than getting the timing right,” Fink wrote in his annual chairman’s letter released Monday. “Some of the market’s strongest days came amid the most unsettling headlines.”

He pointed to the past two decades as a stark example: every dollar invested in the S&P 500 grew more than eightfold. But investors who missed just the 10 best days over that stretch would have earned less than half as much.

The warning from the billionaire comes as markets are increasingly driven by rapid shifts in sentiment tied to geopolitics, inflation and technological disruption. Stocks rallied sharply Monday after President Donald Trump said the U.S. and Iran have held talks and that he was halting strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure.

“The danger is that we focus so much on the noise that we forget what actually matters,” Fink wrote. “The forces behind today’s headlines have been building for a long time. The old model of global capitalism is fracturing. Countries are spending enormous sums to become self-reliant — in energy, in defense, in technology.”

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with a $14 trillion in assets under management at the end of 2025.

Fink also warned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence could amplify inequality, enriching those who already own assets while leaving others further behind.

“The massive wealth created over the past several generations flowed mostly to people who already owned financial assets. And now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale,” he said.

Companies tied to AI have driven a significant share of recent equity market gains, concentrating returns among a relatively small group of firms and their shareholders.

Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who has been dogged by his past friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, announced Wednesday that he will resign from teaching at Harvard University by the end of the current academic year, the university said.

Summers previously served as president of Harvard.

His resignation came as the university was conducting a review of emails and other documents detailing Summers’ connection to Epstein, which were released in recent months by the Department of Justice and Congress.

Summers has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. He will not teach or take on new advisees until his retirement is effective.

“In connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein that were recently released by the government, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein has accepted Professor Lawrence H. Summers’ resignation from his leadership position as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government,” Harvard spokesman Jason Newton told CNBC in a statement on Wednesday.

“Professor Summers has announced that he will retire from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of this academic year and will remain on leave until that time,” Newton said.

Summers’ resignation comes three months after he took a leave from Harvard, where he had been teaching classes, and after he resigned from the board of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI amid controversy over the release of emails between him and Epstein.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement obtained by CNBC in November.

His statement came on the heels of reports by the Harvard student newspaper, The Crimson, which detailed how Summers had sought guidance from Epstein while pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman.

In a statement to The Crimson on Wednesday, Summers called his decision to leave his professorship “difficult,” but also said he remained “grateful to the thousands of students and colleagues I have been privileged to teach and work with since coming to Harvard as a graduate student 50 years ago.”

“Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor, I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues,” Summers told the newspaper.

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Paramount Skydance on Monday guaranteed the backing of billionaire Larry Ellison in an amended offer for Warner Bros. Discovery — a clear response to questions raised by the WBD board of directors.

“Larry Ellison has agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion of the equity financing for the offer and any damages claims against Paramount,” the company said in a news release.

Paramount said Ellison, the father of Paramount CEO David Ellison, has also agreed not to revoke the Ellison family trust or adversely transfer its assets during a pending transaction.

Paramount Skydance is offering $30 per share, all cash, for Warner Bros. Discovery in a hostile attempt that’s meant to rival an agreement with Netflix.

Last week, Warner Bros. Discovery chairman Samuel Di Piazza told CNBC’s David Faber the board had concerns about the supposed backing of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in the bid.

“We were not confident that one of the richest people in the world would be there at closing,” Di Piazza said at the time. “Doing a deal is great; closing a deal is better.”

WBD earlier this month agreed to sell its studio and streaming assets to Netflix in a transaction valued at roughly $83 billion on an enterprise basis. Paramount wants to buy the entirety of WBD, including its portfolio of TV networks, and says its offer comes with an enterprise value of $108.4 billion.

Paramount notably did not increase its bid on Monday, reiterating that it believes the deal is superior, though Paramount did increase its proposed reverse breakup fee to match that of Netflix’s offer.

“What we’ve done in this amended filing is we’ve cleared the brush of obfuscation around the offer,” said Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.

RedBird is an investor in Paramount Skydance and has also committed to financing the proposed Paramount acquisition of WBD.

“Like we’ve done through the six bids that we’ve made, we are being responsive to what their concerns are,” Cardinale said.

Shares of Warner Bros. Discovery rose 4% in premarket trading Monday, while shares of Paramount gained 3%. Shares of Netflix were flat.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Wednesday that he will resign from the board at OpenAI after the release of emails between him and the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Summers had announced Monday that he would be stepping back from all public commitments, but it was not immediately clear whether that included his position at the artificial intelligence startup.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company, and look forward to following their progress,” Summers said in a statement to CNBC. 

OpenAI’s board told CNBC it respects Summers’ decision to resign.

“We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board,” the OpenAI Board of Directors said in a statement.

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Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Monday that he was stepping back from all public commitments amid fallout from the release of emails between him and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement obtained by CNBC.

“While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort,” said Summers, who is a former president of Harvard University and who teaches at the school.

Summers is a member of the board of OpenAI. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg News.

CNBC has requested comment from OpenAI.

Summer’s statement came after Harvard’s newspaper, the Crimson, published an article detailing his emails with Epstein, which came to light last week when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released more than 20,000 documents it obtained pursuant to a subpoena from Epstein’s estate.

The Crimson noted that when Summers was “pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he sought guidance from a longtime associate: convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.”

Emails and texts between the two men from November 2018 and July 2019, showed Summers, who was and is married, turning “to Epstein for advice on his pursuit of the woman,” the paper reported.

“Epstein was quick to chime in with assurance and suggestions, describing himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ ‘wing man.’ ” the Crimson noted.

Epstein killed himself in August 2019, weeks after he was arrested on child sex trafficking charges.

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Former U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Larry Lindsey has withdrawn his name from consideration for the position of Fed chair, CNBC’s Eamon Javers reported on Thursday.

“I have a very full varied and enjoyable life right now that I don’t want to give up to go through the mill of public life,” Lindsey told Javers via text message on Thursday.

Lindsey was one of the candidates being interviewed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. President Donald Trump has been considering a list of candidates to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for when his term expires in May.