Davos Man; How the Billionaires Devoured the World

400 Pages·2022·2.576 MB·English

by  Peter Goodman

Dedication
For Leah, Leo, Mila, and Luca
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part I: Global Pillage
Chapter 1: “High Up in the Mountains”
Chapter 2: “The World That Our Fathers in World War II
Wanted Us to Live In”
Chapter 3: “Suddenly, the Orders Stopped”
Chapter 4: “Our Chance to Fuck Them Back”
Chapter 5: “It Had to Explode”
Chapter 6: “Every Stone I Looked Under Was a
Blackstone”
Chapter 7: “They Are Now Licking Their Lips”
Part II: Profiteering Off a Pandemic
Chapter 8: “They Are Not Interested in Our Concerns”
Chapter 9: “There’s Always a Way of Making Money”
Chapter 10: “Grossly Underfunded and Facing Collapse”
Chapter 11: “We Are Actually All One”
Chapter 12: “We’re Not Safe”
Chapter 13: “This Is Killing People”
Chapter 14: “Is This a Time to Profit?”
Chapter 15: “We Will Get 100 Percent of Our Capital
Back”
Part III: Resetting History
Chapter 16: “Not Somebody Who Is Going to Disrupt
Washington”
Chapter 17: “The Money Is Right There in the
Community Now”
Chapter 18: “Put Money in People’s Pockets”
Chapter 19: “At War Against Monopoly Power”
Chapter 20: “Taxes, Taxes, Taxes. The Rest Is Bullshit.”
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
“They Write the Rules for the Rest of the
World”
F
or 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