Obama meets with tech CEOs, media can't get story straight

President Barack Obama gathered a group of chiefs from some of America's most prominent employers today, including several tech giants, to discuss his plans to reboot the economy. The core component is a federal stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Too bad the White House didn't include an attendence list in the canned remarks at whitehouse.gov, because media reports differ on who was there.

NBC reports this list of ten attendees:

Steve Appleton of Micron Technology; David Barger, of Jet Blue; Motorola's Greg Brown; John Bryson, the retired CEO of Edison International; Debra Lee of BET Holdings, Inc; Xerox's Anne Mulcahy; Antonio Perez of Eastman Kodak; Michael Splinter of Applied Materials; Corning's Wendell Weeks; and Ron Williams of Aetna.

The Washington Times claims IBM CEO Sam Palmisano and Honeywell chairman and CEO David Cote were among only ten attendees at the meeting. Palmisano is second from left in this photo from the event, along with Brown, Mulcahy, Obama and Schmidt.

Notably not there, either way: Steve Ballmer from Microsoft, Carol Bartz from Yahoo, or Steve Jobs from Apple. Jobs has been making money in the middle of a meltdown. Doesn't he have any advice to share?

The President announced a new website, recovery.gov, that will track the progress of the stimulus package. "Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy," he said in a prepared speech, "decisions about where we invest will be made public on the Internet."

Obama's overall tone was so pro-business a Republican could love it. "Instead of just throwing money at our problems, we'll try something new in Washington -- we will invest in what works," he said. "The answer to our economic troubles rests less in my hands, or in the hands of our legislators, than it does with America's workers and the businesses that employ them."