The $2.5 Trillion Photo: China's President Xi Jinping Meets With Heads Of Apple, Amazon, And More

A picture is worth a thousand words. In the first official U.S. visit of China’s President Xi Jinping this week, nothing speaks louder than one single photo on China’s hopes for its high-tech diplomacy.
On Wednesday, President Xi toured Microsoft MSFT +1.61% during the 8th U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum in Seattle. After discussing a wide range of issues such as intellectual-property protection and Internet governance, Xi and 30 top China and U.S. executives posed for a group photo — in which Forbes counts a total market cap for all represented companies of $2.5 trillion.

In the first row, you can see the most powerful tech CEOs in both countries – the combined market cap of the companies they run amount to $2.1 trillion. Standing in the center is President Xi himself with host Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. China’s powerful Internet czar Lu Wei stands next to Nadella, after which come two of the most familiar American tech CEOs, Apple AAPL +0.39%’s Tim Cook and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, flanking Tencent’s “Pony” Ma Huateng. To Xi’s right stands IBM IBM +1.39%’s Ginni Rometty (one of only two women, with Lisa Su, CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices AMD +%), Alibaba ’s Jack Ma, Cisco’s John Chambers, and JD.com ’s Liu Qiangdong. Facebook FB +3.37%’s Mark Zuckerberg, the first executive on the left, chatted with Xi in Mandarin as the president joined the lineup. “On a personal note, this was the first time I’ve ever spoken with a world leader entirely in a foreign language. I consider that a meaningful personal milestone,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “It was an honor to meet President Xi and other leaders.”
Other big names in the second and third rows include Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn LNKD +1.06%, Cheng Wei of Uber competitor Didi-Kuaidi, Yahoo YHOO +2.11%! Cofounder Jerry Yang, and AirBnB’s Brian Chesky.