The Davos I knew is over

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.