Twitter not invited to Trump tech meet ‘for failed emoji deal’

US President-elect Donald Trump did not invite Twitter to a high-profile meeting he had with Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives, apparently snubbing the social media giant for refusing to create a ‘crooked Hillary emoji’, media reports said on Thursday.

The President-elect held discussions at Trump Towers here in a bid to make peace with a number of high-profile tech companies after relations soured during Trump’s election campaign. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was not invited to Trump’s summit with major tech leaders yesterday in retaliation for reneging on a USD 5 million emoji deal with the president-elect during the campaign, The Hill quoted a source with knowledge of the matter as saying. With some 17.3 million followers of his account, the president-elect had successfully made Twitter into the de facto press channel of his transition operation.

Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s chief strategist and communications director, bounced Twitter from the meeting as payback for the failed deal, The Hill reported.

Spicer denied involvement, saying he “had absolutely nothing to do with this meeting.” And in a tweet, he called reports that the failed emoji deal led to Dorsey’s lack of invitation “another example of false, reprehensible, pathetic, tabloid faux journalism.” 

The emoji was supposed to show bags of money being stolen and would be offered to Twitter users as a replacement for the ‘Crooked Hillary’ hashtag, which has been very popular in recent months.

“They weren’t invited because they aren’t big enough,” the President-elect’s transition team said, although there are numerous rumours that other reasons were behind Twitter’s ban from the meeting.

Among those in attendance were India-born chief of Microsoft Satya Nadella, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Oracle’s Safra Catz, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Intel’s Brian Krzanich, Elon Musk from Tesla, Chuck Robbins of Cisco and Ginni Rometty of IBM.