Highly secured well facilities, a mountain of new building applications, and gyms that are no longer gyms - what the WEF means for well masters, authorities, and school children.   

In order for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to use Davos tap water without any concerns, security measures are needed. For him, as well as for the other high-ranking guests of the World Economic Forum 2024, the Davos water supply is strictly monitored. To prevent sabotage, the police and military are assisting. A visit to the facilities to see for yourself is not possible due to security reasons.

Susanne Stöckl

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However, the well master is more concerned about everyday cases of damage, as he explained to SRF's regional journal during the last WEF. These include, for example, knocked over hydrants or burst water pipes. Such an incident directly in front of the Congress Centre would be a worst-case scenario for those responsible for the water supply.

More than 100 extra building applications

There is a state of emergency in, around, and above Davos. Here’s a brief summary in numbers from the previous year:   

In contrast to the numerous guests or the army deployment, there has been little reporting on the building applications. The large number of applications is due to the fact that every change requires a submission. This includes temporary buildings or facade advertising, as well as the conversion of shops and restaurants. During the WEF, for example, you can find IT companies or tourism organisations from abroad in these places.

Claire Micallef

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In total, the work surrounding the WEF will cost half a million francs. This includes the entire planning for construction and dismantling, as well as for security personnel. All of this is paid for by the companies themselves.

These renovations are nothing more than a "huge mess" for Jules. And the traffic situation is also a challenge for the primary school pupil and his class these days: streets are suddenly blocked off and the way to school is no longer as usual. "I think that’s stupid," says Lea, adding: "Now I have to walk along the main road, which is also dangerous."

On the other hand, gym class is cancelled because the hall is being used for the WEF. And the children think that’s "cool". And the also like that instead, they get to go skiing for three days.

Davos in a state of emergency

Is the WEF worth all the effort?

Journalist Peter Goodman, author of "Davos Man", argues that the billionaires gathering in the Alps for the World Economic Forum's annual meeting are a “separate species” who have become so powerful that they’re writing the rules for the rest of us.

The term “Davos Man” was coined by political scientist Samuel Huntington who first used it in a 2004 essay in which he described people so enriched by globalisation that they were effectively living without loyalty to any particular nation. He was referring directly to anyone who regularly made the journey to Davos to attend the annual World Economic Forum, more generally known as WEF.

The term has since grown into a catchall used by journalists like Goodman to refer to those occupying the “stratosphere of the globe-trotting class” of billionaires.

SWI swissinfo.ch spoke with Goodman during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in 2022.

SWI: You’ve been to WEF ten times. What keeps you going back?

Peter Goodman (P.G.):It’s actually a really interesting experience if you remind yourself that you’re a journalist and you don’t have to play by the socially imposed rules. You can observe people up close in a way in which you normally can't with people so powerful and wealthy. The part that's hard to take is the packaging that ‘they are committed to improving the state of the world’ as if a gathering of the ultimate beneficiaries of the status quo is somehow going to lead to this.

P.G.:I think the WEF’s primary achievement is that it’s given billionaires, who are continuing to pursue an agenda of tax cutting, deregulation and public relations management, a way to signal to the world that they get it, that they get the problems of economic inequality and climate change. And they're really dedicated to doing something about it.

There are an awful lot of highly intelligent, thoughtful, accomplished people who work for the WEF. They put out reports that are significant. A lot of the panel discussions themselves tee up issues of importance. But let's not kid ourselves. It’s ultimately under the guise of a non-profit, a highly successful business run by Klaus and Hilda Schwab. We don't know where the money goes.

SWI: In your book, you blame billionaires for a lot of our problems. Is it really just a few bad apples or is it a more systemic problem?

P.G.:It's a systemic problem. I could have written this book by picking 20 other characters. I picked the five who I thought were the most compelling. These are big players. It's not like I've just cherry picked some bad offenders. Steve Schwarzman is the world's largest private equity magnate and owns astonishing amounts of real estate around the world. Larry Fink is the world's largest asset manager. His company, BlackRock, manages $10 trillion worth of investments. The impact is enormous. Jeff Bezos requires no introduction.

Marc Benioff is a very significant Silicon Valley tech player and is the most vocal on stakeholder capitalism. I think he is dedicated to philanthropy and a believer in the ethos of the Forum. And yet, despite presenting himself as an agent of human progress, he's ultimately an enabler of the status quo, which is exactly what the Forum is. It's an enabler of the status quo under the guise of a change agent.

SWI: All of these examples come from the United States. Do you think this, specifically the growing power of the billionaire class, is an American phenomenon?

P.G.:It's not uniquely American. It might be to the extreme. But look at France, where, Emmanuel Macron, who is a Davos man, comes into office financed by a bunch of billionaires, including his friend Bernard Arnault, with the mission to lower or eliminate wealth taxes. He runs as this transformational agent who's going to spread opportunity in France and shake this ossified, anti-business, overly bureaucratic society with high unemployment and modernise it. And the first thing he does is lower wealth taxes and then he increases gasoline taxes, much to the consternation of most people living outside of major cities who need their cars to get where they're going. And the result is the Yellow Vest movement and a surge of support for Marine Le Pen's extreme immigrant demonising movement.

This may have started in the US going back to Milton Friedman and his theory of shareholder maximisation as the organising principle of commercial life. But it was then exported around the world.

The global elite, whose wealth is hard for the rest of us to fathom, have created a set of interests that are just separate from the rest of ours. And that's ultimately why I came up with this concept of the Davos Man, as a separate species, because for all intents and purposes, these billionaires, who are powerful enough to write the rules are effectively inhabiting a separate reality than the rest of us.

SWI: Do you see Switzerland’s role in the emergence of Davos Man as significant in any way?

P.G.:The secrecy element, as an inherent part of doing business, is certainly significant. The fact that Switzerland has for now generations been a place where wealthy people can show up, no questions asked, and conduct their business and find a highly competent bureaucracy that protects their secrets to move money around – I don't think that's an accident.

It’s no coincidence that this non-profit that is actually a highly successful business is propped up in a country that presents secrecy as a comparative advantage.

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SWI: You write in your book that the pandemic revealed the “full dimensions of Davos Man’s voracious appetite”. How so?

P.G.:The vaccine situation is even worse than I imagined when writing the book. We are effectively subsidising Davos Man's monopoly profits on these handful of vaccines, that we are grateful for, through the perpetuation of the pandemic. Why are we still talking about all these variants? Well, most of humanity doesn't have these vaccines. Why is that?

Because leaders said, the market will just take care of it and this well-intentioned pharmaceutical industry will protect humanity. And it’s failed completely. We’ve distributed the vaccines so that the shareholders of Moderna and Pfizer get as much as possible. And the result is that, if we're lucky enough to live in countries like the US or Switzerland, we got vaccines aplenty. However, in Pakistan, where there's still doctors treating frontline medical workers, not so much.

SWI: You published the book in January 2022, about a month before the Ukraine war. If you wrote another chapter now (May 2022), what would you write?

P.G.:If I were still working on the book, I’d write about these sanctions, which are kind of incredible in the way Europe has united behind them. But let's remember that the sanctions are effectively exempted for private equity. I’ve just pointed the finger at Switzerland but the US is the ultimate offshore banking centre because Davos Men benefit by having private equity not governed by the same demands for transparency that the normal banking system has. The point of my book is to say this is not by accident. This is the direct consequence of the financial services lobby and specifically private equity understanding that the more secrecy there is, the more money flows in.

Let’s assume that putting pressure on Russian oligarchs will actually influence Putin, we aren’t even applying the full pressure on oligarchs because we're protecting our own oligarchs

SWI: What do you think WEF should do differently?

P.G.:All the right words are spoken at Davos. That's not the point. Ultimately, it's not about the wealth in Davos. It's about the rest of us. The people in democratic societies have to get over this idea that we can look to these good billionaires to solve our problems. Our problems are not going to be solved until we demand things like progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, and labour mobilisation so that workers can get a piece of the action. It’s not about reforming the billionaires.

How ‘Davos Man’ hijacked capitalism

André Kudelski: “We will need to closely monitor the North-South tensions”




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André Kudelski, CEO of the Kudelski Group, analyses the 2023 edition of the Davos Forum (WEF), with its reshuffled cards in terms of multilateralism and the growing divide between North and South due to the Ukraine conflict.

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is about to come to an end. Without a leading head of state, with the exception of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, is the 2023 edition of this summit to be classified as a minor year?

André Kudelski, whose corporation has been part of the 100 strategic partner companies of the WEF since 1999, considers it an interesting barometer of the interests of the main industrialised countries. It's worth noting that lately, the richest countries seem to have slowed down in their pursuit of multilateralism.

“We're currently seeing all kinds of initiatives for more local production, or what is called friend-shoring - having things produced in allied countries - which is not a multilateral system,” André Kudelski says in the RTS show "La Matinale". This loss of appetite for the multilateral system on the part of the rich countries highlights all the more “a great thirst for multilateral collaboration on the part of the southern countries”.

According to the Vaudois, the Davos WEF is to be seen as a compass, a functional tool. Intended for the ecosystems of governments, businesses, media and now also some NGOs, it allows to sense trends, to identify challenges. And if the slogan of the WEF, “improving the state of the world”, seems ambitious, even misleading, for André Kudelski, the mission of the summit is not to solve problems, but to identify them.

From the perspective of Switzerland and Europe, the war in Ukraine is extremely important. But it is not perceived in the same way by the southern countries, who feel a great injustice.

“What I've been able to identify this year is a big problem between the North and the South. And I think we need to be very careful, in the coming months and years, not to underestimate this problem. From the perspective of Switzerland and Europe, the war in Ukraine is extremely important, with a very important element of solidarity. But it is not perceived in the same way by the southern countries, who feel a great injustice. This is something we need to monitor closely,” he estimates.

An unchanging institution that punctuates the economic year - and mocked by some as the summit where “billionaires come to tell millionaires how the middle class is doing” - the Davos Forum paradoxically owes its longevity to its ability to change: “Over ten years, the evolution is very significant. What is striking is the increasingly numerous companies that are invading the city: there's not a single café that remains neutral. Davos is becoming more of an ecosystem, with several things happening in parallel, rather than just elements at the Congress Centre”, says André Kudelski.

The most positive element of the meeting is the multiple dialogues, according to the entrepreneur, who is personally involved in many initiatives that emanate from the WEF. “It’s a very strong place for multilateralism. And if today we see that there's a kind of crisis of multilateralism, that doesn't mean it's a crisis of Davos, but a crisis of the entire ecosystem.”  

North-South tensions

Find out where you stand

PODCAST - A walk through the less conventional and visible places of the World Economic Forum

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Reporting on the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos often takes place from the main stage of the Graubünden Congress Centre or from the rooms of the so-called "panels". In this episode of our in-depth podcast "The World Out There", we take a look at the less conventional venues of the Forum, which however best reflect the so-called "spirit of Davos". A coffee in the "Central Lounge", a visit to the "Media Village" and one to the "Open Forum" to critically reflect on the gathering of the powerful in the heart of Graubünden.

Behind the scenes of the WEF in Davos

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The WEF costs several million Swiss francs, thousands of soldiers are being deployed and Davos is at a standstill. But is it worth it?

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