It’s the Super Bowl for the ultra-rich.
Every year, up to 3,000 people flock to Davos, Switzerland, each paying $29,000 (plus a huge membership fee) to attend the five-day World Economic Forum, filled with panels, jet planes and parties.
They come to rub shoulders with corporate executives, heads of state, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers and A-list celebrities who, together, aim to “solve the great crises of the age,” writes Peter S. Goodman in his new book, “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World” (Custom House), out now. It’s “an event where the interests of Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger and Greta Thunberg all somehow intersect in time and space.”
Getting into Davos is impossibly complicated, even for those lucky enough to score invites. First, you must gain membership, limited to just 1,000 of the world’s biggest corporations, which starts at $62,000 per year and can run up to $620,000 for “strategic partners.” (Government employees, non-profits, and media outlets get in for free.) The ski resort town has only so many hotel rooms, with even bare-bones chalets going for more than $400 a night, so some attendees must commute in from neighboring villages, where accommodation is limited and going for absurdly inflated prices.
As a result, “the anxiety of exclusion pervades,” journalist Nick Paumgarten once wrote about the scene. “The tension between self-celebration and self-doubt engenders a kind of social electricity.”
Hard to believe it all started in 1971 because Klaus Schwab, a 33-year-old German economist and University of Geneva business policy professor, wanted to teach US management practices to European firms.
Schwab grew up in Europe’s postwar reconstruction — his family left Germany for Switzerland to escape the Nazis — “steeped in the principles of social democracy,” Goodman writes. While studying public administration at Harvard, Schwab made friends with mentors like Henry Kissinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, and came up with his “stakeholder theory” — the idea that a company should serve not just its shareholders, but also its employees, suppliers and community.
Schwab wanted a way to discuss these concepts with high-powered contacts on an annual basis, so he started the event — originally called the European Management Forum. He chose Davos as its home base because “the remote and placid setting seemed conducive to a focused interchange of ideas.” The mountain village already had a colorful history — it hosted numerous tuberculosis sanatoriums for wealthy Europeans during the 1800s, and Albert Einstein was a regular visitor in the early 1920s, once giving a lecture on relativity to a summit of visiting academics.
Read More: How the World Economic Forum became the most exclusive party ever