A Hater's Primer on Davos and the World Economic Forum

International relations. They're not doing well right now. Trump's administration does not regard them as very important to maintain, respect or preserve. We've heard this song and dance on this blog, other blogs, and middling pundit sources before. Between the Trump Administration deciding to take direct military action in Venezuela, saber rattling with Iran and annexation efforts with Greenland, American-made crisis feels like an outsized export.

I want to single out an upcoming event that has traditionally been under the purview of policy nerds: Davos, or the World Economic Forum annual meetings. They describe the 2026 annual meetings this way:

World leaders from government, business, civil society and academia will convene in Davos to engage in forward-looking discussions to address global issues and set priorities. The call for bold collective action makes the meeting particularly relevant.

Think of it like a mega-sized think tank of celebrities and politicians, getting together at a ski chalet for a Burning Man festival of libertarian ideas. Their staffers mill around them wearing little comic-con looking name tags and talk like they want to form some sort of start-up or hedge fund in the next five years. Some of them will decide to do just that.

Usually, these mineral water and espresso fueled presentations discuss concepts by experts to discuss innovative ideas. Naturally, this meant that expert real estate slumlord Jared Kushner hosted a Board of Peace seminar where he put up a bunch of AI mockups of what real estate developments in Gaza. Sadly, the guy that threw a shoe at George W Bush was not available to give that idea the response it deserved. Kushner's model of presentation, where a white guy that has money makes suggestions with devastating consequences, occurs once about every two to three hours at the Davos Meetings. Unfortunately for the rest of us, these ideas sometimes happen and get funded by American capital.

All of these events happening at the forefront obscure one crucial underlying factor about Davos: that these indifferent elite boneheads neglected to prevent any of the fascist nonsense happening. In fact, they actively perpetuate suffering on the global South and get away with it because they're not tweeting out garbage at 3 AM like Trump does.

I don't really want to talk about Trump in this post. We know how he talks. We know he is looked at with contempt by international leaders. What I do want to point out is the ecosystem around Davos that predated his terms and how it teed up the ethnonationalism with a shrug and a handwave.

Take European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde, who walked out of a dinner because Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was sharply talking about Europe. I'm not going to defend Lutnick since he's been actively making essential supplies for Americans like furniture and clothing more expensive through tariffs. The point is that Lagarde has no problems when suffering is placed on countries where she advocated for austerity measures as IMF chief. Suffice it to say that this woman's decisions has caused billions of people to go to bed hungry with the lights off. But she wears fancy Hermés scarves and knows calculus, so she gets a pass from fancy economic circles. Yes, even after the negligence conviction.

The Davos set is funny, to me. Lagarde can certainly walk out in a huff to avoid talking to Lutnick, but this doesn't hide the stink of sharing stages with the likes of Elon Musk. Even after screwing up the U.S. government via DOGE and putting child assault image generation into Grok, Elon gets to go on a stage and talk about "how to scale transformative technology." Yeah, like anyone decent wants to hear about scaling from the guy that lets people generate images of people in bikinis on demand.

This brings us to a fundamental quandary with a very simple answer: do intellectual leaders and elites think we have no memory span of what people like Elon do on a daily basis? The answer is yes. They expect you to simply deal with the fact that they will respect and listen to people like Musk and Kushner, who are ethnonationalist horrors that perpetuate human rights crimes. Why? Because they have money and are connected to corridors of power. That's it.

Davos is a pageant and a sleight of hand. I think it is worth paying attention to, however, to monitor what gets treated as standard policy thought. In 2026, Elon Musk gets a blank check to say what he pleases while tweeting constantly about the decline of the white man on his social pages. He's been putting his thumb on the scale of far-right movements across the world. We don't hear a peep about this from European elites in attendance, nor from any World Economic Forum organizers. They don't worry about what him and his cohort of rich racists want. Worrying is for us poors without a security detail.

I close off this post about 2026 Davos with this standard-issue cowardice by Axios, who shyly nudge people that maybe there's a role for independent editorial in commentary:

While more executives are turning to different formats for interviews (or doing the interviewing themselves), there's still an appetite for the kind of interview and coverage legitimacy that news outlets can provide.

Consider my appetite for this Entertainment Weekly-flavored nonsense curdled. I'll look for my legitimacy elsewhere.