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Snow covered alps, private jets, and coved white badges. The world's elite will descend on Davos for the World Economic this week.
Hundreds of executives and world leaders have once again traveled to Davos, Switzerland for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum the WEF.
So true impact of CIS meeting stems from being united around the common mission of committed to improving sub state of.
Subot That's WEF founder Klaus Schwab in his opening remarks on Tuesday. Historically, the gathering, which Schwab started in nineteen seventy one, has been about dialogue and cooperation between businesses and governments. Billionaire attendees hear a lot about multilateralism and equity and inclusion. But this year something or someone is scrambling the Davos agenda together.
We're going to cut your taxes, end inflation, slash.
Your prices, getting them back.
Down, raise your wages, and bring.
Thousands of factories back to the USA.
The second Trump era is here and the Davos set is adjusting.
I think corporations are setting aside a lot of social questions questions that are not about the dollars and cents and.
The bottom line.
Ted Man covers money and influence for Bloomberg, and he says the approach many CEOs and presidents and prime ministers in Davos are taking is part of a larger trend.
If you were a cynic about the rhetoric about climate change, for instance, or DEI coming out of this very costed set of rich people who are not going to be hurt by the worst things that happen, Yeah, this would kind of reward that cynicism, I think, because it flipped on a dime and they don't seem troubled by it.
President Trump isn't making the trip to the World Economic Forum this year. They'll deliver a virtual address on Thursday. But fresh off Trump's inaucuration, the wheels at Davos are already turning, and business elites are more poised to align with him than ever before. I'm David Gura, and this
is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, I talked to Bloomberg reporter Ted Mann about how President Trump's return to the White House is playing out in Davos and what that tells us about the influence he has in palaces, c suites and boardrooms around the world. So maybe for the uninitiated, you could describe what is taking place this week in Davos, Switzerland. This is a small ski town in the Swiss Alps.
An invasion of the CEOs. Yeah, it's the biggest annual conference of the richest, most powerful people in business. I'm sort of flying into to talk about what they do to amass their fortunes and also how they think the world should operate itself.
This year's list of attendees includes Ukraine's president Vladimir Zelenski, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Diamond, and the heads of other big banks Barkley's and Bank of America, to name just a couple others.
Historically, it's been a lot of conversations about the ways in which they expect the leading governments to exercise power and the way they, you know, essentially what business expects of democracies in some cases, and starting at the beginning of the Trump era, it was a lot of figuring out how to respond to this fairly unusual character who had taken power in the United States.
During his first term in office, President Trump traveled to Davos twice.
Ladies and gentlemen, pretace welcome forty fifths President of the United States Donald J.
Trump to the States, and Ted says it was clear this was not friendly territory for the America first president.
Going back to Trump's win in twenty sixteen, certainly through his victory last year, there has been a thread of
distrust of globalism, just disdain for free trade. Really like discussed with some of the policy things that tend to come out of Davos, talking about climate change, talking about diversity and equity and inclusion, and so the very cultural whipping boys that the Trump movement loves to beat up on really emanate from places like Davas and the global financial structure that people like Steve Bannon and some of the thinkers behind the Trump movement have identified as the
cause of misery for millions of Americans, like they're represented by Davos.
That dissonance sometimes came to a head, like in twenty twenty when climate activist Greta Tunberg gave a speech just an hour after.
This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism.
You say, children shouldn't worry you say, just leave this to us, we will fix this. We promise we won't let you down. Don't be so pessimistic, and then nothing silence.
You couldn't imagine a situation in which Donald Trump would be less comfortable, a powerful president but having to confront a young woman famous for climate activism and for idealism, when he is essentially a creature of almost its opposite.
So four years ago, when it looked like the closing of the Trump period, there was I think a bit of a sigh of relief that this fairly unpredictable person and set of executives around him would be exiting the stage and they could get back to setting what at the time seemed like a more normal course of both business policies and social policies led by some of the executives who are in that scene.
But with Trump back in office, Ted says, the forty seventh president is looming large over this year's gathering.
It's not just that he's Donald Trump and that he has Trumpian inclinations about things that they care about. It's more that the United States did this dance once and is going back to do it again.
How is their attitude toward Donald Trump different this time around than it was the first time he was inaugurated.
I mean, I think the biggest change is how quickly the rest of the crowd is falling into line. I would say that most of the business world is hivoting to account for Trump's inclinations and his policies and his stated preferences in a way that there was a little bit of resistance earlier. In the first phase, there was a little bit of a sense that the world would figure out how much they had to deal with Trump's way of seeing it. And now it is Trump's way,
the highway. His re election and his return to power signals a new way that business will have to accommodate itself to, as opposed to setting its own verse of the normal and figuring out where he fits.
In coming up, Ted breaks down how specific business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are shifting their approach to Trump. Since Donald Trump was elected again, a parade of some of the world's richest and most powerful men, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, have showered the president with praise. None of them made the pilgrimage to Davos this week, but they were front and center at Trump's inauguration.
Was one of the Who's who are the world's wealthiest people in tech elite surrounding President Donald Trump as he took the oath of office, all gathering a combined net worth exceeding one point three trillion dollars for the occasion, all sprinkled in among Trump's own family.
I assume you've been thinking about this as I have been. But what's changed, What accounts for kind of the change in tact that we've seen from these executives who during the first term and after really wanted to have some distance, some remove from Donald Trump.
Well, it's a really good question, and I think probably the answer is slightly different depending on which of those executives we're talking about. People like Jeff Bezos, they've experienced the risk of being on the wrong side of Donald Trump. Donald Trump was president, and he went after Bezos's newspaper, and he went after Bezos's Amazon Empire, and he went their Pentagon contracts, and he criticized their work with the
Post Office. The Bezos who right now is cozying up to Trump and going to his Florida club and having dinner and sitting on the diasid his inauguration is a guy who has been on the wrong side of this power and seemingly does not want to be again. I think you could say the same with Mark Zuckerberg, where there has been over the majority of this past decade, this growing antipathy to big tech such as Facebook represents
on the right the cliches there's no fighting city Hall. Well, there's no fighting in the White House, and that seems to be the posture that they've decided to adopt. And what's different this time is there's no prettying it up. They're not being coy about it. They're being very upfront about the fact that they will be on this guy's side,
literally at his side as he takes office again. And that seems to be the biggest change that there's not going to be any sense of keeping a public posture where there's space for his opponents and the people who are horrified by Trump and scared of him. There are really no olive branches being offered in that direction by the leaders of these companies.
At points of societal and political upheaval. Kind of see executives look right and look left, see how their counterparts are reacting. And I wonder how much of that is at play here that you have executives who are noticing the way that, say, Jeff Bezos is comporting himself from Mark Zuckerberg and taking cues from that, or are we seeing that on display in Davos, but more broadly in boardrooms and incorporations around the world.
The answer seems to be yes. And certainly if you talk to the people who work for those executives, they're taking cues from the way others are playing it. Look at the way the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is not a department, but this doge thing, it's popping up in the earnings calls. People are asking what this is. People are looking around saying, what do we have to acknowledge this thing? Do we have to talk about what we could get from it, how we could be hurt
by it? And yet I think they're watching what their peers are doing. And that goes from the sort of government affairs level all the way up to the executive offices, and certainly in the weird Interregnum period where you had these pilgrimages down to mar A Lago, where one CEO after another or sometimes two at a time, would go and have lunch or have dinner with him. Yeah, it did seem to be that everyone realized, this is a trip we have to make, This is a tribute we
have to pay. If my fellow tech billionaire is doing it, I should probably do it too. If I don't do it, will my investors wonder why I didn't If we suddenly get hit by some executive action and February So, I think, yeah, they learn from each other's example.
There are so many executives who are talking about the promise of there being less regulation. They're optimistic that the economy is really going to take off. Are there any dangers on the horizon, great clouds that these folks see, or are they kind of totally swept up in this optimism about the second term?
Right now? The obvious answer is tariffs. I think Trump has been playing it a little bit differently than he said he would on day one, but it's clearly something that is still a possibility, and that would be unbelievably disruptive to individual companies, to the nations affected, to the flows of trade. And it's a bit of a cliche in American politics, but I think a lot of Trump's supporters really believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do, except for one thing that they
hope he doesn't. And the biggest example of that is this tariff pledge that he's made, where he has tons of support from America's business leaders, but in private, most of them are really hoping that that does not turn out to be what he delivers.
This year, Davos coincides with President Trump's inauguration, his first week back on the job. He's not going to go there in person, but he's going to do this virtual address. What are we likely to hear from him? What are folks who are gonna, I guess, gather in the Congress Center and watch this piped in from Washington. What are they going to be listening for?
I mean, the safest answer to that question is to not try to predict exactly what he'll say, which like tarifs are a perfect example. Right like day one, We're going to do all this stuff and then they didn't do it on day one. But certainly Trump will be talking about American interests and will be repeating some of what he said in the inaugural speech. This notion that Americans have been taken advantage of. It's the consistent theme throughout his public career that we are not getting as
much back from the world as we are giving. And I think it's safe to assume that that theme will be expressed throughout. We've gotten a raw deal and we are here to reset the terms of exchange on whatever particular topic he settles on, whether that's tariff's, whether that's the notion of combat and climate change, whether it's mentioning NATO and national security. That is the Trump message. The Trump message is that we've been getting screwed out of
something and he's here to fix it. So I think that is, generally speaking, the theme that everyone should expect ted. Thank you very much, thanks for having me.
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. For more on how the Davos elite are preparing for another Trump presidency, check out this week's Trump Anomics Bloomberg. Stephanie Flanders convened a panel in Davos to discuss how leaders gathering through the World Economic Forum's annual meeting are realigning their priorities and business plans to better fit the new president's agenda. This episode is produced by Jessica Beck.
It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Brian Schappata. It was fact checked by Adrian A. Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Sagia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven and our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponceo. N cole Beemster Boor is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back tomorrow