New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- WASHINGTON - On Thursday evening, Tim Cook will walk into a state dinner at the White House. It is not the first time he has done something like this. Not by a long way. But this time, he will sit down as Apple's executive chairman, the title he has held for exactly three weeks, while the man who now runs the company stays in Cupertino.

The dinner is the centrepiece of a summit between Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, beginning Wednesday and running through Thursday evening. Cook arrives at the table alongside Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Tesla's Elon Musk, every one of them the sitting chief executive of their company. Cook is the only...