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A year ago, it seemed plausible that the world’s most important gathering would fizzle. Then the CEO of the world’s largest money manager took it over, twisted some elbows — and it’s so back.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stepped in at a precarious moment for the World Economic Forum. Its longtime chair, Klaus Schwab, had departed under a cloud of scrutiny. Populists and nativists had upended its globalist view. CEOs cloistered themselves inside the hotels to do business to avoid associations with the conference’s progressive programming.
Fink cajoled CEOs onto the Congress Center’s main stage and pushed some WEF programming out into the wild. And he personally asked US President Donald Trump to come, he confirmed in an interview Thursday, an appearance that cemented Davos’ relevance.
“I played some role in bringing people here, but it was not a hard lift,” Fink told Semafor. “All the uncertainty that everybody writes about, everybody wanted to come here and talk about it.”
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Semafor’s view
The 2026 World Economic Forum was the most substantive either Ben (a white badger since he worked for BuzzFeed) or I (so sophisticated I let my colleagues take the fancy badges) can remember, a sentiment confirmed in our conversations with attendees who’ve been coming far longer. It was a bit less fun, less spontaneous, perhaps — though maybe we’re just getting old. This was a working year for us, and for Fink: When asked to relay his wackiest encounter of the week, the BlackRock CEO said he had scarcely made it out of the Congress Center.
But if Davos was less free-wheeling than in years past, so is the world. Reflecting that reality saved Davos — from the populists, and from itself.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address “was a speech for the ages,” Fink said, though he declined to weigh in on Carney’s assessment of an unfixable “rupture in the world order.”
“I may not agree with everything everyone said, but I believe we created a forum where people were speaking louder and more boldly,” Fink said. “I was encouraged by the openness of conversation.”
The signing of the Board of Peace charter, whatever you think of Trump’s intentions or its America-centered logo, brought Davos back to its early days as a place to not just ponder, but act. In the late 1980s, WEF brokered a climbdown between Greece and Turkey. In 1992, Nelson Mandela, newly released from prison, appeared on stage with South African President FW de Klerk.
Thursday’s memorial Lally Weymouth lunch, organized by Dina Powell McCormick, put Israeli President Isaac Herzog, HRH Princess Reema of Saudi Arabia, and Sheikh Salman of Bahrain in the same room.
So Davos is here to stay. And Fink also signaled, for all the talk of Detroit and Jakarta, that it’s staying in Switzerland. When it comes to a rumored move, “we’ve never had a formal conversation at the governance committee or the board,” he said, adding that “we can create more dialogue, not just in Switzerland” and mentioning WEF spinoffs in Istanbul and Mexico City.
Notable
- The Swiss organization behind Davos faces “a moment of crisis,” swissinfo.ch reported last year, asking if the WEF could save itself.