Obama pops over to Silicon Valley for tea

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and several other Silicon Valley luminaries before heading over to Intel.

Obama was social networking with some of Silicon Valley's top brass in a non-political effort (*cough*) to learn more about the economy and education. What better way to learn more about the economy than getting advice from a group of people who have made several billion dollars each?

While the Apple and Facebook CEOs don't share the same competitive territory, the conversation might not have been scintillating. Jobs is supposed to be taking it easy as he has stepped aside from running Apple and is probably trying to keep a low profile. The last thing Jobs needs is to be asked what he is going to do with the $60 billion his company is sitting on. And Mark Zuckerberg is, well, the founder of the privacy-shredding Facebook, but also Time magazine's 2010 person of the year.

The private dinner was also attended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Cisco CEO John Chambers and venture capitalist John Doerr. That must be over $200 billion sitting at the table. We know Obama is smooth but that he managed to get such a group of high-powered Silicon Valley industry executives around one table is an impressive feat.

"The president specifically discussed his proposals to invest in research and development and expand incentives for companies to grow and hire, along with his goal of doubling exports over five years to support millions of American jobs," said presidential spokesman Jay Carney.

Today Obama will fly to Portland, Oregon to visit Intel's complex of R&D operations and chip fabs in Hillsboro, where he will meet with CEO Paul Otellini to discuss Intel's Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education programme, which is intended to create high technology jobs. µ