Has the merry-go-round of the global elite summit – epitomised by the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, which concluded this weekend – had its day? As I saw at Davos when I was editor of the finance magazine Spear’s, the WEF has been out of touch for years. Its costs of attending are now so expensive that it is increasingly difficult to justify attending what is essentially a global-class corporate ego massage circus.
The first problem with Davos as a platform to ‘improve the state of the world’ is that there are now plenty of other, smaller, and more exclusive global insider CEO ‘thought leadership’ conferences. There is the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, the Milken Conference in LA, the Google Summer Camp in Sicily, and Brilliant Minds in Stockholm.
Critically, these other conferences don’t come with pressure to sign up to the ‘climate change’ religion. Many CEOs attending Davos – especially from emerging economies such as India and Pakistan – were never keen on the Paris Agreement but felt peer pressure to keep their thoughts to themselves.
The ardency with which Klaus and Hilde Schwab, the founders of Davos, embraced the climate change agenda risks making Davos less relevant. As Davos attendees found out last week, signing up to an orthodoxy at odds with Donald Trump’s new ‘Golden Age’ agenda is becoming less palatable.The whole point of Strategy Partner delegates paying $628,000 to attend Davos is to be on the inside track of the global CEO deal tent, not sitting outside it. Trump giving his address to the WEF Congress Centre via Zoom link also demonstrates that you don’t actually need to be at such events – and burn up air miles – to have an impact.
When Trump announced, on the opening day, that he was freezing $300 billion in federal funding for green infrastructure projects, it must have felt a little like being a Protestant member of court standing inside Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Queen Mary I on 1 October 1553. You knew the ‘old religion’ was returning as the state religion and that there would be pain and purges.
Being at a party with Volodymyr Zelensky may be nice, but the reality is that the political forces that have recently shaped the world – Covid, Brexit, Trump, populism, immigration – have not chimed with the Davos agenda or their elite. They have been left hanging.
Davos now stands out as a symbol of global elite hypocrisy. This was seen in the way the WEF conference hall erupted into almost bizarre applause when Trump’s live video was broadcast. These were the very same Trump critics who secretly hoped he would attend, diverting Air Force One for a special visit. A rumour even spread on the first day that a suite had been reserved at the AlpenGold Hotel, the top accommodation for political dignitaries.
Such stories are typical of Davos attendees’ appetite for delusion. Theresa May once described Davos’s ‘Citizens of the World’ as ‘Citizens of Nowhere’, and she had a point. No social tribe is more detached and nomadic than the global elite who flock to the Magic Mountain of Davos each year as if to remind themselves they are still relevant and important – that their lives and companies are not just about making money and being ‘caring’ global billionaires, politicians, or CEOs.
For all the talk of climate change and world inequality, this is often just window dressing for the real agenda of Davos
The term ‘Davos Man’ was first coined by political scientist Samuel Huntington in a 2004 essay, in which he referred to a tribe of globe-trotting wealthy global citizens who operated as a ‘separate species’. With Trump’s ‘America First’ MAGA agenda, this sort of globetrotting thinking is quaintly out of touch.
The Davos optics have not been helped by sordid accounts of the darker side of what really goes on. The Daily Mail sent reporters undercover this year to reveal how the after-hours deal-making culture includes a boom in escort services. Prostitution in Switzerland is legal, but reports of NDAs for escorts, cocaine-fuelled parties, and excessive spending funded by shareholders have tarnished Davos’s image.
For all the talk of climate change and world inequality, this is often just window dressing for the real agenda of Davos. As Sir Martin Sorrell once told me, Davos is as much about ‘intense networking’ – read deal-making – as it is about trying to improve the world. The reality is that it is a VVIP card-swapping opportunity ne plus ultra, as well as one of the best places in the world for capital fundraising.
The vast fees are often paid for fear of missing out. This fear can be felt in a series of reportedly ‘begging’ emails from Elon Musk, trying to get himself invited years ago before he was the world’s richest man.The other problem with Davos is that anybody rich enough can attend as a delegate. Insiders will tell you the real point of being there is to buy a platform or panel slot to get seen and feel important – to delude yourself into thinking you’re doing your bit to leave the world a better place.
However, clubs change like fashion. Any ‘pay-to-play’ club will inevitably be superseded by genuinely ‘invitation-only’ conferences where you aren’t paying $600,000 for top-tier access. By 2026, it may not be ‘See you in Davos’ but instead, ‘See you elsewhere.’
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