At the White House late last year, Joe Biden found himself at a private lunch with a small group of tech leaders who had flown in from Silicon Valley. Among them were billionaires Reid Hoffman, the undisputed quarterback of the industry’s Democratic political initiatives, and his close friend Mark Pincus, the Zynga founder who, by the holidays, would become one of the few people so far this cycle to cut the legal maximum—$929,600—to the Democratic National Committee.

Their conversation centered on how Biden might use digital, influencer-driven platforms such as TikTok to circumvent the mainstream media, and ideally present the president in a more flattering, less filtered light. The lunch, which hasn’t previously been reported, was part of a new effort by Biden world—orchestrated by the master producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is playing match-maker—to better cultivate business elites, who have oodles of cash, healthy egos, and who have never really felt like they were in the president’s inner circle, as they did during the Obama era.