Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick paused his artificial intelligence-focused summit with global leaders on Wednesday to give foreign representatives a piece of steel from the World Trade Center that was destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The gift was incredibly personal for the Trump official. Lutnick was dropping off his son on the first day of kindergarten when he got the call that a plane had struck the North Tower, where his firm Cantor Fitzgerald sat on the 101st through 105th floors.
Lutnick lost 658 of his 960 employees that day. At his 40th birthday party, just two months before the terrorist attacks, 65 couples joined him and his wife, and he later reflected that 27 of those at his party were killed on 9/11. Among those killed were his brother, Gary, and best friend, Doug.
“We are heading into, in less than two weeks, the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and those many years ago, I took some of the steel from the World Trade Center and melted it down, and I made little one inch squares and gave a one inch square to each of the members of this ministerial to show respect for them and just to show them that this is that time of the year for me,” Lutnick told The Daily Wire.
During the summit with G20 leaders, Lutnick explained that the gift also recognized that “it was these countries that immediately stood behind us and with us in those days. So I thought it was incredibly warm and uplifting.” The steel was placed into a red box featuring an engraved message that read, “In memory of Gary Lutnick and my 657 friends and colleagues.”
Lutnick informed representatives of the foreign nations that his company had a policy that when there was a job opening, everybody at the firm was asked, “Does anybody know anybody who could do this job?” He said in an interview that the result was “not only one big happy family, but people really, really care about the company.”
Lutnick told The Daily Wire that his gift was warmly received by the representatives in attendance.
“Their comments were warm, kind, and incredibly supportive, historically from when those events happened and how deeply moved they were to remember that.”
One of the G20 countries in attendance was Canada, whose government-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently told its staff to not refer to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as terrorist attacks. Instead, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation told staff to call the attacks “passenger jet crashes in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and Manhattan.”
After the personal moment on day two of Lutnick’s G20 talks, the countries got back to work discussing the future of AI policy and innovation. Ultimately, all 20 of the attending countries reached consensus on policy moving forward. Lutnick said the agreement reflects “a shared commitment to advancing innovation, investment, and economic growth across our economies.”
Over the course of two days, participating countries heard from top leaders in the AI space, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Palantir’s Alex Karp. Across the discussions, the message from the private sector focused on arguing that nations’ biggest concern related to AI should be “getting left behind.”
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