The great unwokening at Davos
A former corporate exec explains why the world’s CEOs are suddenly sucking up to Trump and ditching DEI.
Jennifer Set, Spiked Online
Every January, world leaders and CEOs gather in the Swiss mountain town of Davos for the annual week-long meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). There they discuss the big issues of the day and present themselves as global agenda setters.
But there was something very different about this year’s confab. All the reports from the WEF suggest that the attendees have started to warm to US president Donald Trump and many of his policies. Which has come as a shock to those accustomed to Davos bigwigs talking up workplace diversity, promising to fight climate change and denouncing the rise of ‘authoritarian’ populism.
As someone who was once part of corporate America, I wasn’t actually surprised in the least. Why? Because Davos attendees are not the green, woke zealots – determined to impose their vision on the world – that so many imagine them to be. They are followers of political fashion, not trendsetters. They just want to be in with the cool kids – and maintain their obscene wealth. Those two priorities trump any political concerns, including resistance to their old foe, Donald Trump.
Now that professional athletes are doing the ‘Trump dance’ on the playing field, and Snoop Dogg is performing at inauguration festivities, being for Trump confers more cool-kid status than being against him. This is why, despite all of the handwringing about Trump being a danger to democracy since his first election win in 2016, the globalists are now on board with his presidency. Or at least they want to appear to be in public.
Speaking at the 2017 WEF, Frans van Houten, the then CEO of Phillips, was concerned about Trump’s presidency. ‘I would worry about disruptive measures and new-found nationalism closing borders’, he warned. Fast forward eight years and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is wishing the new Trump administration all ‘the best’.
It’s quite a shift. Every year, since 1971, these unelected, self-appointed leaders have spent a week in the Alps discussing how the rest of us should live. They fly into the exclusive mountain resort on private jets to discuss the need for the rest of us to use LED lightbulbs, drive electric cars, stop using oil and eat bugs. These rich white guys tell us we need to disavow our white privilege. Or at least they did talk about these things, until Trump’s win.
The WEF has been scorned by populists and conspiracy theorists alike. They all believe that this unelected body works overtime to hijack democratic processes around the world, setting its own agenda on climate change, DEI and anything else it deems of the highest importance.
Of course, democracy should and must decide how our nations are run, rather than corporate kings and their diktats. But to say the WEF actually rules the world is to misunderstand what it is really about.
An invite to Davos is the hot ticket for any CEO. It is invitation-only and is the ultimate signifier of insider status. When I was in corporate America (I was chief marketing officer at Levi’s until she resigned in 2022), there would always be a flurry of activity each year in the late autumn when the invitations were handed out. The CEOs act like hordes of freshman girls awaiting their acceptance into the popular sorority. There’s angling and jockeying by corporate-communications leads to get their bosses a coveted invite.
Davos signifies ‘you’ve made it’ status. If you’re the CEO of Fortune 500 Company No498, and you’re invited to sit next to WEF chairman Klaus Schwab or Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, or Justin Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern, you have surely reached the big time. Even if you don’t get to speak during the forum, you can still be in the room where it happens.
Make no mistake, these CEOs are obsessed with status. For all their talk about woke causes, they really don’t care about the details. All of that was just PR for their companies and for themselves.
Their concern with being seen to be woke largely stemmed from the fact that being rich and powerful ceased to be deemed admirable. It instead became the ultimate mark of ‘privilege’ – a slur in a DEI-dominated world. So the CEOs had to do something to make sure people still liked them and their companies. The solution? Market how social justice-y you are! Suddenly, they could remain rich and still be liked by their woke kids and young employees. Woke capitalism was more a bulwark against cancellation than a firm ideology.
But with the most powerful leader in the world now disavowing DEI, executive-ordering it out of the federal government within hours of taking office, the tables are turning.
I have long argued that these CEOs would abandon wokeness at the first sign of it having a detrimental effect on their brand and profitability. Bud Light’s ‘hiccup’ with trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, and the brand’s subsequent loss of share and stock value, was early evidence of that. Today, Bud Light is back to bro marketing, with not a transwoman in sight.
Conspiracy theorists would argue with me. ‘The WEF is pulling the strings’, they say. ‘There are dark forces at play that have nothing to do with money!’ But they’re wrong. CEOs care mostly about money and status. If they have to abandon wokeness because it turns out to be a money loser, they will. They aren’t giving up their millions or private jets.
Now these titans of industry are listening to Donald Trump and others like him. Speaking at the WEF last week, Argentinian president Javier Milei denounced ‘the mental virus of woke ideology’ as the ‘great epidemic of our time that must be cured’. ‘This ideology has colonised the world’s most important institutions’, he said. ‘It is essential to break these ideological chains if we want to usher in a new golden age.’
When Trump was livestreamed into Davos, he broke WEF protocol by declaring fossil fuels a priority and diversity initiatives ‘absolute nonsense’. Yet the CEOs just nodded along.
It makes for an incredible about-face on the part of the global leadership class. The views previously held by the insiders are out, and they are now pretending they never enthusiastically advocated for censorship or hated Donald Trump. They would have you believe they are pro-merit, anti-DEI devotees, and always have been.
The great unwokening of the corporate elites has begun.
Jennifer Sey is founder and CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She was formerly the chief marketing officer of Levi Strauss and Co.
