Davos Man, page 3
Generally, Davos Man was not big on introspection that conflicted with the bottom line. He was mostly annoyed that inequality was even a topic, given that it clashed with his favorite sort of tale—the ones where everyone lived happily ever after so long as the unfettered pursuit of wealth was sacrosanct.
What Davos Man supposedly cared most deeply about was channeling his intellect and compassion toward solving the great crises of the age. He might have retreated to his mountaintop palace in Jackson Hole or his yacht moored off Mykonos, but he was too obsessed with rescuing the poor and sparing humanity from the ravages of climate change.
So he was here—paying fees reaching several hundred thousands of dollars a year for a Forum membership, plus another $27,000 per head to attend the meeting—posing for photos with Bono, congratulating Bill Gates on his philanthropic exploits, tweeting out inspirational quotes from Deepak Chopra, and still finding time to buttonhole that sovereign wealth chieftain from Abu Dhabi in pursuit of investment for his luxury-goods mall in Singapore.
This was my seventh year attending Davos as a journalist, though I still felt out of place. Throughout my prior career—working first as a freelancer in Southeast Asia, then as a junior reporter in Alaska, later as a Shanghai-based correspondent for the Washington Post, and eventually as a national economic writer for the New York Times—I have centered my reporting on people who have suffered the consequences of Davos Man’s depredation. I have written about families who have lost their homes to foreclosure in Florida and California, workers whose wages have eroded from Ohio to England, landless laborers enduring feudal poverty in the Philippines and India. I am used to operating in places where CEOs are scrutinized as potential sources of harm—a stark contrast to Davos, where billionaire executives are celebrated as benevolent agents of progress, with journalists frequently complicit in the narrative.
But in 2010, I accepted an offer to oversee business and technology coverage at the Huffington Post, which then seemed poised to overtake legacy media. Its founder, Arianna Huffington, gravitated toward any buzzy gathering that included billionaires who might finance her next venture. She brought me along to Davos to project the sense that she was the vanguard of journalism, having poached an old-school newspaper guy from the Times.
When I jumped to another digital upstart in 2014 as the global editor in chief, I continued going to Davos as an exercise in brand building. And when I returned to the Times in 2016, moving to London, where I became a roving global economic correspondent, I carried on with the Forum, because I had reluctantly come to see it as journalistically useful. Amid the preening and virtue signaling were people—potential sources—who were intimately involved with issues of consequence.
If you were willing to break decorum and pose pushy questions, you could learn things of value, even if much of it was off the record. I talked to the Iraqi president about the future of ISIS, and pressed central bankers and Treasury secretaries on matters of economic policy. I buttonholed Jamie Dimon and provoked his laments about the tax code. I attended a dinner with Peter Gabriel, who revealed that he was making music with monkeys.
More than anything, I gawked at the spectacle, at once horrified and mesmerized. The contrast between the Forum’s noble packaging and its crude reality was surreal.
I saw billionaires engage in simulations of the Syrian refugee experience—led around in the dark while blindfolded, as angry officials demanded papers—before savoring truffles at dinners thrown by global banks. Outside conference rooms featuring discussions on human trafficking, I watched venture capitalists fist-bumping over having scored invites to the bacchanal thrown by a Russian oligarch who flew in prostitutes from Moscow.
Pharmaceutical industry executives began their mornings in meditation sessions led by mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn before retiring to private suites to plot their next merger engineered toward lifting drug prices.
A loose and informal hierarchy was at work. The ultimate Davos Men like Schwarzman and Fink rarely appeared in the main areas of the Congress Centre, where the panel discussions were held, generally confining themselves to exclusive lounges for corporate members or private suites at hotels scattered around town. Heads of state would occasionally sweep through the building accompanied by their security details.
Second-tier Davos Men—corporate executives and investment managers whose net worth was confined to the mere tens of millions of dollars—tended to meet one another and journalists in hotel lobbies, while popping up at cocktail parties hosted by consulting and accounting firms. Finance and trade ministers from Europe, Australia, and Latin America huddled in the hallways with economists, executives, and journalists.
Prominent writers and intellectuals wandered about. Nobel laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Shiller were perennials. Former government officials turned lobbyists were well represented, using Davos as a central venue for networking. Al Gore was somehow everywhere.
The peasantry of the proceedings—bleary-eyed journalists, bespectacled academics, anxious entrepreneurs relentlessly pitching their start-up companies, the working stiffs of the diplomatic corps, and activists affiliated with human rights and environmental organizations—could generally be found in the bowels of the Congress Centre, in lounge areas outside the meeting rooms, occupying uncomfortably round-backed chairs upholstered in dull tones of brown and tan. There, some loitered in a grown-up game of musical chairs, perpetually looking out for an unused power outlet so we could charge our smartphones. We journalists scanned for people worth talking to, while deleting some of the hundreds of emails sent by overeager PR flaks seeking to connect us with the venture-funded company that had pioneered a way to sell our dream lives to advertisers or turn recycled potato chip bags into couture dresses for refugee children.
Everyone stole glances at one another’s badges, which were helpfully color-coded in a hierarchical identification of worth: white for standard grade participants, platinum for senior government officials, and orange for regular working press, who were denied entry to many events while stuffed into a spartan media tent that reinforced their lack of status.
My own white badge gave me free reign to wander as I desired, attending all sessions and approaching other participants, or positioning myself strategically to overhear conversations between Davos Men. I was an outsider with insider privileges.
Every now and again, some master of the universe in an especially well-cut suit would appear briefly, invariably in a hurry, donning a badge embossed with a hologram. This was like spotting a unicorn. We regular badge holders speculated over what cosmically important doors they might open.
Indeed, for most participants, much of the Davos experience consisted of not really grasping what the hell was going on, while nursing the sense that more interesting things were surely happening to more connected people somewhere else. We scrutinized one another’s faces for some flicker of recognition, looking past and around the useless masses in pursuit of someone plugged-in, or the odd celebrity—the actors Matt Damon and Forest Whitaker were wandering around this year—all while trying not to be stampeded by the battering ram of a security detail escorting Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu.
On my first night in town, I dropped my bag at my rented apartment and trudged through the snow to the Belvedere Hotel, a colonnaded white fortress towering over the main street.
I was attending an “executive dinner forum” featuring a discussion about the pushback to globalization. The event was a joint production of the Financial Times, the salmon-tinted newspaper that was required reading among the globe-trotting tribe, and Wipro, an Indian consulting firm. The published agenda promised an exploration of appropriate responses to the “turbulent mix of uncertainty and complexity” roiling the global economy.
If Davos Man had come to dinner hoping to be reassured that the story would end happily, he was in for a bummer.
Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization at Oxford University, warned attendees that they were at risk of wasting the potent virtues of the modern economy—the connectedness, the convenience, the technological advancements that had rescued humanity from disease, poverty, ignorance, and boredom.
“There’s never been a better time to be alive, and yet we feel so glum,” Goldin said. “So many people feel anxious. So many people feel that this is one of the most dangerous times.”
Goldin had coauthored a prescient book4 that highlighted one especially potent danger that could derail the global economy: a pandemic that shut down supply chains. The world had become so dependent on goods transported across oceans that trouble in any one place could quickly spread everywhere. Major companies had been ruled by an imperative to stay lean as a way to cut costs and reward shareholders, leaving them little margin for error once such a scenario unfolded.
Goldin rattled off a list of other alarming developments. Trump appeared likely to yank the United States from a global pact aimed at limiting climate change. Britain’s abandonment of the European Union risked splintering the bloc.
“You can’t stop managing an entangled environment by disconnecting,” Goldin said. “The idea that somehow we can forge our future in an insular way, even for the biggest countries like the U.S., is a fantasy.”
This was all globalization boilerplate. But then Goldin articulated the tricky part for Davos Man. He was going to have to make sacrifices, Goldin said, or the world could be in for a replay of the Renaissance. That celebrated period of extraordinary scientific progress, commercial growth, and artistic creativity in Europe ended in revolution. The gold leaf adornments to Tuscan cathedrals were glittering statements of the era, but they did not put food on the tables of the peasantry. The spices landing in Mediterranean ports from Asia were at the center of a lucrative global trade, yet they were too expensive for most people to enjoy. By the eighteenth century, angry mobs turned on the Medicis, the family that ruled Florence, sending the clan fleeing.
“We need to learn these historical lessons,” Goldin concluded. “We need to make the choices to ensure that globalization is sustainable, that connectivity is sustainable, that we deal with the intractable problems that are worrying people.”
When the members of a panel took their seats to discuss how to proceed, it quickly became clear that Davos Man was not especially inclined toward sacrifice.
Abidali Neemuchwala, Wipro’s chief executive, had advice for workers threatened with redundancy: get some job training. “People have to take more ownership of upgrading themselves on a continuous basis,” he said.
My former boss, Arianna Huffington, who had just launched a wellness site that aimed to vacuum up sponsorships from spa resorts, offered her antidote to capitalism’s shortcomings. It involved comfier pillows, more sleep, and meditation.
I spent the next few days surveying proposed solutions to inequality. At a panel inside the conference center, Ray Dalio, founder of the American investment firm Bridgewater Associates, suggested that the key to reinvigorating the middle class was to “create a favorable environment for making money.” This left the impression that the current environment was somehow not conducive to moneymaking, a curious argument coming from a person whose net worth was pushing $19 billion. Dalio touted the “animal spirits” that could be unleashed by stripping away regulations.
At another panel discussion entitled “Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the Indian magnate Mukesh Ambani scoffed at the idea that government ought to attack poverty by transferring wealth from the richest people. Ambani was the chairman of the petrochemicals colossus Reliance Industries. He was hailed as the wealthiest person in Asia5, with a net worth exceeding $73 billion. His prescription for easing poverty was to let technology dispense new forms of credit.
“Embrace the free market for creation of wealth,” he said.
Seated to his left, Marc Benioff perked up. His company, Salesforce, had turned itself into a global behemoth on the strength of software used by businesses to track customer details and leads about future sales.
“Artificial intelligence will create digital refugees,” Benioff said. “People will be displaced from jobs, tens of millions of people across the planet, because technology is moving forward so rapidly, creating much lower cost, much easier to use and more capable work environments.”
Among the actors creating “more capable work environments” was Salesforce itself. The company’s promotional literature6 listed the key elements of its software, including “more personalized outreach with automation,” and “chatbots and other automated messaging.”
Yet on this panel, Benioff presented himself not as the billionaire CEO of a company whose revenues were derived from replacing human hands, but as a concerned citizen.
“Are we going to be committed to supporting and improving this state of the world?” he said. “Or are we just going to kind of let it go as it is?”
The moderator, Ngaire Woods, dean of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, was refreshingly unwilling to let this question pass as just another rhetorical demonstration of Davos Man sensitivity.
“You’ve just painted a picture of hundreds of millions of people who will no longer have jobs,” she said. “What is it that you think leaders should be doing?”
A trustee of the Forum, Benioff reached deep into the well of Davos concepts.
“We really need to be mindful of, and start having these very serious conversations,” he said. “Multistakeholder dialogues, honestly.”
The event at which he was speaking had itself been billed as a very serious conversation. Yet the solution to the problem of his own company threatening untold numbers of jobs was, apparently, more talking.
Not just any kind of talking, though. Stakeholder dialogues.
The word stakeholder is a talisman for Davos Man, its usage evidencing high-minded principles. It is a demonstration that the speaker cares about loftier matters than the crude enrichment of shareholders. They empathize with their workers and their workers’ children. They worry about the vitality of the communities down there, in the shade of their skyscraper headquarters. They would prefer that polar bears not succumb to heatstroke, and that homeless people be housed somewhere.
Benioff has literally written the book7 on this—Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well.
That Benioff has emerged as a leading proponent of such principles is ironic, given that he frequently cites Larry Ellison, the founder of the software giant Oracle, as his mentor. Ellison has no truck with the idea that business is about anything more than adding zeros to his net worth. In an exchange in the dot-com era with my colleague Mark Leibovich, Ellison pantomimed gagging in disgust as he derided technology chieftains who describe their undertakings as moral crusades.
“Oh, well, the reason we’re doing software8 here at Oracle is because someday children will use this software, and we wouldn’t want to leave a single child behind,” Ellison said in a tone of theatrical sarcasm. “What I really care about is making the world a better place.” Then he gagged himself again.
He was talking about people like Marc Benioff.
Reared in San Francisco, Benioff speaks in a vernacular that is equal parts Silicon Valley proselytizer and Davos disciple.
“I’ve always believed that technology9 holds the potential to flatten the world in wonderful ways; to foster a more diverse, trusting and inclusive society while creating once-unthinkable opportunities for billions of people,” he wrote in his memoir, whose title encapsulated Davos Man philosophy—Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change.
Benioff is an apostle of a faith with no shortage of adherents in the technology realm—the now-clichéd admixture of bohemian mysticism and ruthless entrepreneurialism that connected the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road to the naked hordes at Burning Man.
“I have been very fortunate10 to have met a lot of what I would call gurus,” he once said. “I’m probably the only person to use Larry Ellison and the Dalai Lama and Neil Young in the same sentence.”
Partial to Hawaiian shirts, Benioff frequently celebrates the concept of ohana, a Hawaiian term that loosely translates to “family,” and that supposedly formed the central organizing principle governing Salesforce—a spirit of kinship connecting its tens of thousands of employees.
“We love being together as one ohana” is a phrase he has uttered on conference calls with Wall Street stock analysts. During corporate retreats in Hawaii, he led his executive team into the surf as they dug their feet into the sand and joined hands for a group blessing ceremony. In Davos this year, he would host a Hawaiian themed party inside a nightclub featuring a performance by the Black Eyed Peas.
At six foot five, Benioff wandered the ohana floor at Salesforce’s sixty-one-story San Francisco headquarters—the tallest building in the city—in the company of his golden retriever11, who bore the title Chief Love Officer. He was rhapsodic about Dreamforce12, the four-day Salesforce gathering that began as a way to showcase new products but had evolved into a mini-Davos by the Bay, featuring concerts by Stevie Wonder and U2. The days began with meditation sessions led by Buddhist monks. “It’s a four-day opportunity13 to consider big ideas and pursue better versions of ourselves,” he wrote in his memoir.
Benioff’s father had owned a chain of dress shops in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a child, Benioff rode along in the family Buick as his father hauled bolts of fabric and dresses among his six shops.
