And yet, in sharp contrast to the gathering’s past as a neutral space for global cooperation, the WEF became a battleground. Leaders like Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron took shots at each other; high-powered political dinners reportedly descended into heckling and walkouts; and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called time of death on the rules-based order.
The mountain comes down to earth
“This is the largest gathering of global leadership of the post-COVID era,” Larry Fink, CEO of global asset management giant BlackRock, told the assembled delegates at the launch of the event. “But now for the harder question: Will anyone outside this room care?”
Fink — who was brought in to shore up the WEF after the chaotic departure of its founder Klaus Schwab — had succeeded in bringing star power to Davos, from Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to business tycoons who usually steer clear of the event, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk.
Yet even as he succeeded in putting the WEF firmly on the global news agenda, Fink worried about the event’s connection to real people. He told the Forum that, “If we’re being honest, for many people this meeting feels out of step with the moment: elites in an age of populism, an established institution in an era of deep institutional distrust.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hit out at the WEF’s previous years of “utopian consensus” and “kumbaya” in an interview with POLITICO’S Dasha Burns for “The Conversation” podcast. “The inmates were running the asylum at that point,” he said.
“This global elite fared very well under this, and … the rest of the world got substantially pushed down in terms of their prospects,” Bessent argued, pointing to the resurgence of populist movements worldwide as a backlash against the liberal elitism the WEF of previous years embodied.