High roller attendees in Davos are complaining that Mar-a-Lago pageantry and SXSW-style corporatism have spoiled the elite summit.
As President Donald Trump returned to the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps for the first time since 2020 this week, attendees lamented that the event, which once focused on international cooperation to tackle global challenges, had turned into a spectacle of world-order posturing and corporatism.
In an attendee group chat, some likened the event to SXSW, the tech and film festival held in Austin, according to Vanity Fair, which reported that the famous Davos Promenade is lined with brand activations from tech giants such as Meta, TikTok, Coinbase, and Stripe.
Meanwhile, Alex Karp’s surveillance tech giant Palantir set up its “Palantir Pavilion” across the street from the “USA House,” a privately funded venue housed inside a 142-year-old church that is serving as a base for Trump administration officials.
Crowds lined up outside USA House, Vanity Fair reported, jostling for access to Trump’s cabal, which included White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, son Eric Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
That didn’t mean the president’s entourage was warmly received by everyone. As Trump, 79, was greeted by a message reading “TRUMP GO HOME” carved into the snow upon landing in the highest city in Europe, people were seen walking down Davos Promenade wearing “Make Science Great Again” and “Make Europe Great Again.”
When Lutnick, 64, tried to give a speech at a VIP dinner hosted by BlackRock’s Larry Fink, he was met with “widespread jeering,” and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde bolted for the door, according to the Financial Times.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
Peter Goodman, The New York Times’s in-house Davos expert, noted that the summit—first held in 1971—has undergone a long shift from a forum for genuine global cooperation to one where such ideals amount to little more than virtue signaling.
But he said the summit’s ethos has shifted so dramatically that even virtue signaling has been abandoned.
“It seems pretty clear that Larry Fink of BlackRock, who took over from Klaus Schwab, is leaning into making this purely a business conference,” he observed. “All the former buzzwords — social justice, sustainability — have gone. They’ve sanitized virtually every part of it to make the Trump administration feel welcome. It was a big score that they got Trump to attend.”
He added that “to the extent that there’s virtue signaling, it’s signaling to Trump.”
