Obama’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit Celebrates Muslim Outreach

President Barack Obama and Saudi Arabia's King Salman walk together to a meeting at Erga P
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

President Barack Obama will appear at Stanford University in Silicon Valley on Friday to be keynote speaker at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), which will highlight his commitment to building bridges to Muslim-majority countries around the world.

Obama has claimed that his efforts to overhaul U.S. Middle East policy has restored America’s’ “broken” relationships with the Muslim world — the crowning achievement of his administration.

Through a series of six earlier GES meetings hosted in Washington, D.C; Turkey; the United Arab Emirates; Malaysia; Morocco; and Kenya, the President has reached out to 17,000 people.

The seventh and final GES forum is being hosted by 300 of the top Silicon Valley venture capital firms to welcome 700 budding entrepreneurs from 170 countries around the world. More than 400 journalists are also expected to attend, according to organizers.

Business leaders scheduled to speak at the event include Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

One of the top organizers of Silicon Valley’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit was Elizabeth Holmes, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of Theranos Labs.

Ms. Holmes was appointed by President Barack Obama and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker in a White House ceremony on May 15, 2015 to be one of Silicon Valley’s “creative minds” to help lead the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship Initiative and to plan the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

But as Breitbart News has reported over the last nine months, the once $9-billion-valued “unicorn” called Theranos has crashed after admitting that its blood test data was so faulty that it voided and revised two years of blood tests, covering 3 million patients. The company is in the process sending tens of thousands of corrected reports to doctors, who may have relied on the Theranos tests to make life-or-death decisions.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has hit Theranos with criminal and civil probes; plus the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have proposed shutting down Theranos labs and banning Elizabeth Holmes from the medical testing business for two years.

Despite the bad press, an Oval Office picture of a smiling Barack Obama and Elizabeth Holmes still appear in promotions — such as the “official Medium channel of the United States Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker,” a billionaire with a troubled banking past who is the Chairperson for the 2016 Global Entrepreneur Summit.

The summit is closed to the public, but portions of the speeches and presentations are being livestreamed at http://www.ges2016.org/live/.

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