For most of us, 2020 was a year of prolonged torment. Its very numerals seem likely to endure as shorthand for mass death, fear, isolation, shuttered schools, threats to livelihood, and countless more mundane forms of misery from the worst pandemic in a century.
But one select group—a species of human known as Davos Man—thrived like never before. The wealthiest, most powerful people on earth used their money and influence to separate themselves from the pandemic, riding it out in their oceanfront estates, mountain hideaways, and yachts. They feasted on calamity, snapping up real estate, shares of stock, and other companies at distressed prices. They applied their lobbying muscle to turn gargantuan, taxpayer-financed bailout packages into corporate welfare schemes for the billionaire class.
They seized on the pandemic—a disaster worsened by their plundering of public health care systems and stripping of government resources—as an opportunity to take credit for rescuing humanity. In a year that exposed the fatal consequences of decades of tax evasion by the world’s billionaires, the same people who engineered this monumental grift demanded adulation for their generosity.
“In the pandemic, it was CEOs in many, many cases all over the world who were the heroes,” said Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce, a Silicon Valley software giant. “They’re the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources and their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly—not for profit, but to save the world.”
Benioff was speaking in late January 2021 at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, the ultimate gathering place for the most affluent people on the planet. The pandemic had forced the cancellation of the usual in-person event in the Swiss Alps resort of Davos. In place of the white geodesic dome where Benioff held a lunch that included pop stars like Bono and Will.i.am, he and his fellow panelists convened on a clunky videoconferencing platform. The snow-covered peaks that formed the backdrop to Davos were replaced by drapes and bookcases glimpsed behind the speakers in their home offices. Instead of the free-flowing conversation of the Forum, participants engaged in halting discussion marred by connectivity issues.
But one key attribute endured despite the awkward refashioning of Davos: the lofty pledges for change voiced by the people most invested in preserving the status quo.
Benioff was on a panel discussing so-called stakeholder capitalism, the idea that businesses were no longer ruled solely by the imperative to enrich shareholders, but answerable to a broader array of interests—employees, the environment, local communities. His message was self-congratulatory: mission accomplished.
He and his fellow CEOs had banded together to secure protective gear like face masks and gowns for hospitals. Pharmaceutical companies had developed COVID-19 vaccines in record time. Bankers had unleashed credit, preventing bankruptcies.
“CEOs stepped up this year,” Benioff said. “We would not be where we are in the world today without the outstanding leadership of many, many CEOs who did heroic work all over the world, to basically save their communities.”
Given the wretched state of the world at that moment, Benioff’s depiction was breathtaking, a striking form of self-aggrandizement served up as social concern. It highlighted the gap between the billionaire class and the rest of humankind, one that stretched beyond the decimal places required to convey their fortunes. Benioff and his fellow corporate chieftains were effectively inhabitants of a separate reality—the realm of Davos Man.
Around the world, the pandemic had killed more than 2 million people while threatening hundreds of millions with poverty and hunger. The actual culprit was the coronavirus, but its lethal impacts and economic ravages had been magnified by the actions of the sorts of CEOs who flocked to Davos.
Private equity magnates like Stephen Schwarzman, who once described a proposed tax increase on the wealthy as an act of war—“like when Hitler invaded Poland”—had extracted profits from his investments in hospitals, excising costs while contributing to a systemic diminishing of American health care. Jamie Dimon, overseer of the biggest bank in the United States, had helped secure tax cuts for people who lived in Park Avenue penthouses, paid for by a weakening of government services. Larry Fink, the world’s largest asset manager, broadcast his putative concern for social justice while squeezing poor countries to pay impossible debts in the midst of the pandemic.
The richest man on earth, Jeff Bezos, had added to the colossal scale of his e-commerce empire while failing to provide warehouse workers with protective gear, instead bestowing a valiant sounding title: they were essential workers—a label that condemned them as dispensable, rendering the virus an illegitimate reason to stay home.
If the agony of 2020 had demonstrated anything it was how the rich could not only prosper but profiteer off everyone else’s suffering.
By the end of the year, the collective wealth of billionaires worldwide had increased by $3.9 trillion, even as their philanthropic contributions fell1 to their lowest level in nearly a decade. Over the same year, as many as 500 million people descended into poverty, with their recovery likely to take a decade or more.
The pharmaceutical companies had indeed displayed mastery in concocting COVID-19 vaccines. But they had priced most of humanity out of the market for their lifesaving medicines.
Inside his oceanfront estate in Hawaii, Benioff preferred to exult in his triumphs while using the pandemic as an opportunity to impugn government. Davos Man championed stakeholder capitalism as a means of preempting government regulation; as a substitute for the public making use of democracy to fairly distribute the gains of capitalism. In taking a bow on behalf of corporate executives, Benioff was implicitly advancing the idea that the government need not tax billionaires, because they could be entrusted to fix life’s problems out of their own beneficence.
“CEOs are gathering every week to figure out how we can improve the state of the world and get through this pandemic,” he said, contrasting that against what he described as “the dysfunction of governments” and nonprofit organizations. “They were not the ones who saved us,” Benioff said. “So the public is counting on CEOs.”
Benioff was revealing himself as a choice specimen of a species that we must understand if we are to make sense of what has happened to humanity over the last half century. Widening economic inequality, intensifying public anger, and threats to democratic governance have all resulted from the depredation of Davos Man—an unusual predator whose power comes in part from his keen ability to adopt the guise of an ally.
Over recent decades, the billionaire class has ransacked governments by shirking taxes, leaving societies deprived of the resources needed to combat trouble. In the midst of a public health emergency, Davos Man was pointing to the resulting weakness of government as justification for depending on his generosity.
“We have to say it,” Benioff said. “CEOs are definitely the heroes of 2020.”
The term Davos Man was coined in 2004 by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. He used it to describe those so enriched by globalization and so native to its workings that they were effectively stateless, their interests and wealth flowing across borders, their estates and yachts sprinkled across continents, their arsenal of lobbyists and accountants straddling jurisdictions, eliminating loyalty to any particular nation.
Huntington’s label referred directly to anyone who regularly made the journey to Davos to attend the Forum, their inclusion in the proceedings validating their standing among the winners in modern life. But over the years, Davos Man has grown into a catchall used by journalists and academics as shorthand for those who occupy the stratosphere of the globe-trotting class, the billionaires—predominantly white and male—who wield unsurpassed influence over the political realm while promoting a notion that has captured decisive force across major economies: when the rules are organized around greater prosperity for those who already enjoy most of it, everyone’s a winner.
Davos Man and his hired guns—lobbyists, think tanks, battalions of public relations people, and obsequious journalists who prize access to power over truth—have resolutely perpetuated this idea, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
My mission is to help you understand Davos Man as a species. He is a rare and remarkable creature—a predator who attacks without restraint, perpetually intent on expanding his territory and seizing the nourishment of others, while protecting himself from reprisal by posing as a symbiotic friend to all.
Nowhere is this mode more vividly displayed than at the annual meeting of the Forum in Davos.
On paper, the Forum is just another multiday seminar devoted to steadfastly tackling the problems of the day, with earnest discussions on climate change, gender imbalance, and the digital future. Lest one fail to grasp its high-minded mission, it is spelled out boldly—“Committed to Improving the State of the World”—these words embossed on banners draped from streetlights, on every wall in every meeting room, and on the computer bags carried home as tokens of power by working journalists.
This mantra gives away the central incongruity of the enterprise. The collective fortune2 of the 2020 attendees was estimated at half a trillion dollars. The people who gather in the Alps are, by any measure, the world’s ultimate winners. Their stupendous fortunes, their brands, and their social standing are intimately intertwined with the economic system as constituted, rendering dubious their commitment to improvement—a word that connotes change.
Behind the scenes, the Forum is a staging ground for business deals and strategic networking, a schmooze fest underwritten by financial behemoths and consulting firms, and an opportunity for everyone present to congratulate themselves on making it to the right side of the human divide.
“That is the magic of Davos,” a former Forum executive told me. “It is the largest lobbying operation on earth. The most powerful people gather together behind closed doors, without any accountability, and they write the rules for the rest of the world.”
The history of the last half century in Europe, North America, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. Those reared in the most exclusive communities, educated at the fanciest schools, and intertwined in the most elite social networks have leveraged their privileges to secure unfathomable wealth, shuttling in their private jets between their beachfront villas and their mountain redoubts, buying their children passage to Ivy League universities, while stashing their holdings on Caribbean islands and other territories beyond reach of the tax collector.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of working people grapple with the impossible math of managing bills with paychecks that have shrunk.
The bare facts of this story are now so familiar that they may seem preordained. Books and magazines have dissected how the internet, globalization, and automation have reshaped modern life, rewarding urban-dwelling, educated professionals while punishing the lesser-skilled. Yet much of the literature tends to treat these shifts as beyond our control, like natural phenomena no more subject to human design than the wind and the tide.
The shape of our economies is not the product of happenstance. It is the result of deliberative engineering by the people who constructed the system in the service of their own interests. We are living in a world designed by Davos Man to direct ever-greater fortune toward Davos Man.
The billionaires have financed politicians who champion the uplifting of the already stratospherically uplifted. They have deployed lobbyists to eviscerate financial regulations, permitting banks to lend and gamble relentlessly, while depending on public largesse to cover their losses. They have defenestrated antitrust authorities, clearing the way for mergers that have enriched investment banks and shareholders, while bestowing oligarchic control upon large companies. They have squashed the power of labor movements, shrinking paychecks and handing the savings to shareholders.
Davos Man will tell you that he has earned his wealth by being smarter and more innovative than the next guy. He disdains taxes as a punitive insult to his skill and slavish work ethic. He is fine with handing over a little of his money, but on his terms alone, through branded philanthropic efforts, and especially if it puts his name on a hospital wing, or yields a photo of himself surrounded by grateful children in some wretched country made slightly less wretched by his generosity.
Through official pronouncements, Davos Man tends to dismiss money as incidental to the meaningful enterprise: Improving the State of the World. His social media platforms and technology “solutions”—algorithms and devices that give companies Godlike knowledge about customers and employees—are, in the mythology of Davos, expressions of his yearning to foster community. His financial derivatives, the complex instruments that played a central role in producing the 2008 global financial crisis, are a manifestation of his fervor to allow the marketplace to liberate humanity from small-minded minutiae like arithmetic.
You already know that the billionaires have triumphed comprehensively, amassing unprecedented wealth along with defining influence over the course of modern life. What we need to understand is how they have pulled it off—by warping the workings of democracy. Davos Man’s monopolization of the fruits of global capitalism is no accident. He has insinuated into our politics and culture what we may call the Cosmic Lie: the alluring yet demonstrably bogus idea that cutting taxes and deregulating markets will not only produce extra riches for the most affluent, but trickle the benefits down to the lucky masses—something that has, in real life, happened zero times.
The history of capitalism is full of wealthy people applying their riches toward securing power, crafting the rules toward furthering their interests. Davos Man’s most cunning innovation is how he has successfully cast himself as a concerned global citizen, while pervading the idea that his continued victories are a requirement for society to achieve any wins at all.
The Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century—industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, and financiers like J. P. Morgan—were by and large satisfied with their wealth as an end in itself. Davos Man’s appetite for affirmation operates on a different level. He is not content with owning homes the way that most people own socks. He pretends that his interests are the same as everyone else’s. He seeks gratitude for his exploits, validation as the product of a just system in which he is a guardian of the public interest, even as he devours all the sources of sustenance. He argues that his own prosperity is a precondition for broader progress, the key to vibrancy and innovation.
This is how Davos Man has managed to turn every crisis into an opportunity for his further enrichment, finding in dire public health emergencies and financial conflagrations a justification for public relief, and implanting in every bailout a mechanism that steers public money his way.
To some degree, we have been titillated by Davos Man’s exploits. We enjoy our billionaire porn—his outlandish birthday parties, glimpses of his trophy real estate, details of his divorce settlements. We watch shows like Billions and see him sweating through the plot twists, and, along the way, we buy into the implicit notion that he has earned his perch.
But now Davos Man’s gluttony is threatening our entire ecosystem. His extreme overconsumption has undermined faith in governance, giving rise to rage among the other creatures in the biosphere.
In this book, I will argue that Davos Man’s relentless plunder is the decisive force behind the rise of right-wing populist movements around the world. Typically, journalists explain such political shifts by pointing to recent events that have been exploited for electoral gain by fearmongering politicians who tap into nostalgia and nationalist sentiments—an influx of immigrants, the loss of status for a privileged group. But the full causes are deeper, stemming from grievances that have built up over decades as Davos Man has pillaged the gains of capitalism, depriving regular people of basic economic security. This has laid the ground for politicians who weaponize fear and foment hate, while prescribing incoherent solutions to legitimate social problems.
Davos Man’s domination of the gains of globalization is how the United States found itself led by a patently unqualified casino developer as it grappled with a public health emergency that killed more Americans than those who died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. Davos Man’s marauding explains why the United Kingdom was still consumed with Brexit—an elaborate act of self-harm—at the same time that it was failing to get a handle on the pandemic. It explains how France became roiled by a ferocious protest movement, and how even Sweden, a supposed bastion of social democracy, now seethes with anti-immigrant hate.
This is not how history was supposed to unfold.
Only a generation ago, a triumphant chorus was proclaiming the effective end of class conflict. The West, led by an all-powerful United States, had won the Cold War, punctuated by a Hollywood ending. The euphoric masses that tore down the Berlin Wall seemed to certify that Communism was dead, leaving capitalism as the universally acclaimed economic blueprint.
Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced “the end of history,” as if the elements that had defeated authoritarianism—free speech, free trade, democracy, liberalized markets, unbridled consumerism—would prove the template for civilization going forward.
Fukuyama was properly ridiculed for applying the gloss of academic authority to a shallow narrative in which the United States would supposedly remain the guiding light for eternity. But his conception aligned with the conventional wisdom that liberal democracy was indeed the most evolved state of social organization, the recipe that would protect civil liberties and enable prosperity, with each reinforcing the other.
Instead, in some countries—among them India, the Philippines, and Hungary—democracy has devolved into the mechanism for the pursuit of tribal vengeance, the means through which popular movements wield tyrannical power, attacking liberalism itself.
How did the supposedly permanent triumph of the free market and the liberal democratic order curdle into the venomous disorder of right-wing hate?
And how did a deadly pandemic—the sort of danger that might have once bolstered a collectivist response—become another moment for profiteering by the richest people on earth?
This, in a nutshell, is what happened.
Davos Man emerged from the triumph of the Cold War to loot the material advances of the peace, depriving governments of the resources needed to serve their people.
The greatest beneficiaries of global capitalism applied their winnings toward the ultimate hostile takeover: They captured the levers of democratic governance. They bankrolled accommodating politicians, and then wielded their influence to tilt the workings of capitalism in their favor.
They demonized government and embraced privatization as the solution, placing public goods in the hands of profit-making companies.
They sold austerity as a virtue and imposed it on government spending, cutting education, housing, and health care. Then they funneled the spoils of this liquidation to themselves through tax cuts. They spread the idea that the world’s wealthiest countries could not afford to furnish health care, education, and reliable public transportation to their people.
They forged international trade deals that generated magnificent opportunities for the professional ranks, while refusing to share the winnings with the rest of the populace. They assaulted labor unions and transferred work to low-wage countries, stifling wages while downgrading full-time jobs to itinerant gigs.
They deregulated banking, boosting their compensation, while triggering a global financial crisis. Then they bailed themselves out and sent the bill to ordinary citizens.
All the while, they poisoned the political conversation with the Cosmic Lie—the fatuous idea that showering the wealthy with tax cuts would trickle benefits down to all.
For the first three decades after World War II, American-led capitalism spread the gains of economic growth widely and progressively. But the capitalism since hijacked by Davos Man is not really capitalism at all. It is a social welfare state run for the benefit of the people who need it least; a sanctuary for billionaires in which systemic threats are extinguished with taxpayer money, while commonplace calamities like joblessness, foreclosure, and the absence of health care are accepted as the rough-and-tumble of free enterprise.
The usual measures of extreme inequality are at once familiar and astonishing.
Over the last four decades, the wealthiest 1 percent3 of all Americans has gained a collective $21 trillion in wealth. Over the same period, households in the bottom half have seen their fortunes diminish by $900 billion.
Since 1978, corporate executives have4 seen their total compensation explode by more than 900 percent, while wages for the typical American worker have risen by less than 12 percent.
Worldwide, the ten richest people5 are collectively worth more than the economies of the poorest eighty-five countries combined.
To take in such numbers is to reckon with the reality that Davos Man’s refashioning of the global economy amounts to a historic act of larceny.
Had income in the United States continued6 to be distributed in the same fashion as during the first three decades after World War II, the bottom 90 percent of earners would have received an additional $47 trillion. Instead, that money flowed upward, enriching a few thousand people while jeopardizing American democracy itself.
And that was before COVID-19.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, the global economy appears likely to emerge with an even more pronounced tilt toward the needs of Davos Man. As publicly financed emergency relief schemes are withdrawn, some working people will find themselves in desperate straits, their savings depleted, making them so eager for jobs that they will be even more vulnerable to exploitation. Racial and class divides will widen.
In the United States and Europe, Davos Man is positioned to gain greater advantage over smaller businesses, many of which will disappear. A future economy dominated by the goliaths will be even more rewarding to shareholders and tougher on workers.
The developing world, short of medical care and teeming with people lacking basics like clean water, may slip further behind. A billion people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty by 2030.
The strife and inequality will create more opportunities for political movements that employ scarcity as a springboard to hate, stoking fear of ethnic and religious minorities as an electoral strategy.
But none of this is inevitable. Like every crisis, the pandemic presents an opportunity for the public to mobilize in pursuit of broader interests.
When historians one day look back at this moment, they will, with any luck, recognize an inflection point, a moment when the dire consequences of inequality became so inarguably grave that they triggered a full-on reckoning with the structural deficiencies of the global economy.
This book is aimed at encouraging that outcome. It contemplates how we might adapt to the profound injustices of the global economy, reviving the sort of capitalism we knew before, in which societies gained the virtues of the market system—innovation, dynamism, and growth—along with functioning mechanisms that fairly apportioned the gains.
A public health emergency has laid bare the vulnerabilities at work around the globe, creating an opportunity for the public to override the usual machinations of Davos Man.
In the United States, Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in November 2020 brought renewed attention to relief for the jobless and others cut down by the economic downturn. The new president filled his administration with economists who had spent their careers focused on the struggles of working people. He quickly helped deliver a $1.9 trillion relief package aimed at ordinary households, redoubled efforts to reduce the monopoly power of giant technology companies like Amazon, and unleashed a campaign to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthiest people to finance government programs for everyone else.
But Biden owed his election in part to campaign contributions from Davos Men, whose interests were amply represented in the ranks of his government. He swiftly dispatched the popular notion that he would hew to his traditional centrist confines, surprising jaded Washington observers with his willingness to challenge the corporate establishment. Biden used the budget process to pursue a significant restructuring of the American economy—one that could reverse decades of raiding by the wealthiest people on earth. He catalyzed an international effort to eradicate tax havens and impose a worldwide minimum rate of corporate taxation. He lent American support to a global campaign to set aside patents toward making COVID-19 vaccines available to countries that could not afford to pay what pharmaceutical companies demanded.
But whether Biden will ultimately deliver is in no way certain, just as efforts at tackling inequality in other countries confronts the reality that those with the most wealth are adept at using it to protect their interests
The billionaires retain a formidable apparatus to fight off attempts to rewrite the rules. They are skilled at striking the pose of responding to societal outrage while protecting an order in which their privileges remain sacrosanct.
Taking on Davos Man requires an understanding of the beast.
Consider this book a guided safari through Davos Man’s unbounded terrain.
We will track five key specimens—Bezos, Dimon, Benioff, Schwarzman, and Fink—while paying special attention to the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Sweden. This study does not fully encompass the world, focusing by design on the United States as the largest economy and the primary architect of (what is left of) the liberal democratic order, along with its leading postwar allies and an oft-celebrated social democratic paragon: Sweden. Today, the ranks of the billionaire class are well represented from China to India to Brazil. Some of these characters are to be found in these pages, along with ordinary people around the globe—migrant workers from Bangladesh, African immigrants in Sweden, itinerant laborers in Argentina, steelworkers in Illinois, and refugees from Afghanistan.
We will also observe other creatures that play a symbiotic role in preserving Davos Man’s dominance—the Forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab; the former American president Bill Clinton; the French president, Emmanuel Macron; Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin; Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party leader in the American Senate; and George Osborne, the former overseer of the British treasury, whose imposition of austerity laid the ground for Brexit. Each of these figures has aided Davos Man in pursuit of fresh prey while helping himself to choice morsels.
We will examine Davos Man’s evolutionary forebears—the Robber Barons in the United States, and Italian magnates who pioneered outlandish forms of tax evasion.
And we will explore the invasive species that has thrived in the aftermath of Davos Man’s destruction of the human habitat—right-wing populists like Italy’s Matteo Salvini and Donald Trump, who claimed power by feigning an attack on Davos Man, while actually advancing his supremacy.
We will see how Davos Man has captured more than wealth and power. He has seized control of the very language that we use to describe what has happened to the world, limiting our expectations for our own societies by convincing us that we cannot afford change. Davos Man presents his own story as the narrative of human progress, rendering efforts to force him to share the wealth as attacks on freedom. He has employed the mechanisms of democracy to sabotage democratic ideals.