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Welcome back to our annual Need to Know: Davos newsletter!
Weโll be reporting to you all next week from World Economic Forumโs annual meeting in the Alps, where thousands of well-heeled members of the global citizenry will gather to discuss all kinds of problems they will then be pilloried for not doing more to solve.
This year, Davos will draw roughly 1,600 business leaders (including 800 CEOs, with JPMorgan Chaseโs Jamie Dimon, Microsoftโs Satya Nadella, and Occidental Petroleumโs Vicki Hollub among them); 60 heads of state and government (including Franceโs Emmanuel Macron, Ukraineโs Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Vietnamese prime minister Phแบกm Minh Chรญnh); 150 notable disruptors across industries, and 200 social entrepreneurs and young leaders involved in various WEF programs. The official theme of the 2024 gathering: Rebuilding Trust.
A powerful convener
For all the criticism it attracts as a gathering of the power elite, Davos (using the name here as shorthand for the conference, not the charming Alpine ski village where the conference is set) has been an early proponent of important ideas like stakeholder capitalism.
It also was early to put sustainability and the consequences of modern technology high on its agenda, but has had trouble having business leaders make good on the promises they make on Davos stages. For example, at the January 2020 meeting, the CEOs of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo appeared on a panel about reducing plastic waste in oceans and acknowledged the need to better address the problemโand then both companies proceeded to increase their use of plastic packaging by hundreds of millions of pounds apiece.
But what are we talking about this year?
The agenda includes more than 200 sessions that will be livestreamed from the WEFโs website. Topics that figure prominently include:
๐ Trade
๐ Climate change
๐ค The Taylor Swift economy
Just kidding, though we wouldnโt be all that surprised. The other big agenda theme is, of course…
๐ค AI
Whether youโve been with us for years, or youโre new this year, thanks so much for being a subscriber. Get in touch with us here, and if you like what you read, weโd love it if youโd forward to a friend. Unlike much of the WEF programming, Need to Know: Davos is open to all.
โHeather Landy