Opus 27: Notes on Davos & The WEF

A first timer's experience with a conference of many extremes

Introduction

I recently attended the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos. Given I now live in Switzerland and was able to secure fairly cheap accommodation, I felt obligated to at least go and see what its’s all about. It was my first time attending the conference so I came in eyes wide open to understand the purpose of the WEF. I did not attend the official WEF events as I am not a WEF member (more on that below) so I obtained a hotel security badge. I also did not stay in Davos but rather Klosters where accomodation was 1/10th of the cost. With that, take the following with a grain of salt and read it as an outsider’s, or poor man’s, view of the WEF experience rather than a definitive one that you could expect to have.

I jotted these notes down throughout the week. It is a relatively disjointed stream of consciousness, but I hope it still be interesting to some.

The Logistics and Venue

By now, everyone knows that WEF is held in the idyllic alpine village of Davos in the Canton Graubunden in Eastern Switzerland. With a population of 10,000 people, it is not a bustling metropolis like where many other global conferences are held, such as CES in Vegas, SXSW in Austin, or MWC in Barcelona. These cities all have international airports, mass transit systems, and massive physical spaces to host tens or even hundreds of people for a few days.

Davos does not. If you are not staying in Davos, you can take either the one winding mountain road into the village from the lower valley or the train. Like all Swiss trains, the Rhätische Bahn is a pleasant experience with beautiful views, punctual travel times, and clean train cars. But even during the rush hour parts of the day the train only runs every 30 minutes. At other parts of the day or later at night it runs only once an hour and stops service at midnight. From what I could sense, most people do not stay in Davos itself and commute in everyday. During the day, the main street, the Promenade, is bumper-to-bumper traffic. It is changed into a one way street with only a few entries and exit points. If you get stuck in Davos after one of the countless late-night parties, sorry, I mean networking receptions, then you are in a bit of a pickle. You can try for one of the night buses or you can try to get a $200+ Uber down to valley towns below.

Upon arrival, everyone must go and pick up their badge. In an era of digital tickets and accreditation, being forced to stand in a line for potentially hours at the busiest times felt archaic. The juxtaposition of standing their waiting for a plastic card badge while being surrounded by ads for AI, quantum computing, and digital transformation was comical.

From what I could tell, most attendees are not WEF members (an annual membership costs anywhere between $50,000 - $500,000) so they have to procure “hotel badges” that various parties sell. In my very brief research, there seemed to be a wild price range for these hotel badges with some as expensive as $2,500+ and others as cheap as $800. They are all nontransferable so I don’t think any entrepreneurial minds could take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity.

There are only a few official WEF venues, most notably the Congress Center, which is what most people think of and see when they watch news about Davos. This is the large, dramatic hall in which Presidents and others give speeches. The rest of the forum (which most agree is the more important and productive part of the entire thing) is held outside of the WEF facilities. But like I said above, this is a tiny Swiss village that was never set up to host a global conference of 3,000+ people. Therefore, Davos improvises.

The other 100+ events throughout the week are held in shops, restaurants, bars, hotel lobbies, basements, and even grocery stores that are essentially commandeered for the week by companies, governments, and other organizations that wish to host events. I find this somewhere between funny and ridiculous. You end up having meetings and attending panels in spaces that, for the other 51 weeks of the year, are ski rental shops, pharmacies, clothing boutiques, or cafes but have had everything ripped out of them for 5 days. This naturally leads to the experience of being packed like sardines into a tiny space never meant for this gathering. It also means that bathrooms, seating areas, public space, and just general facilities are few and far between.

This phenomenon results in what I find to be the funniest part about Davos. You have normal businesses completely rebranded with the most obnoxious, overbearing advertisements. For example, the other 360 days of the year, this building houses a lovely wool clothing boutique, a confectionary store, and a hearing aid store. But, during Davos, it was transformed into The House of India:

This defunct hotel is now Oman’s building:

Deloitte takes over the humble offices of a local travel agency for the week:

But, my personal favorite was the Mongolian government occupying the space of Damia Pizza:

There were dozens of others, including the AI House which took over this bakery and turned the entire exterior bright pink with AI-related advertising. I could have taken dozens of other photos of this phenomenon. To me, at least, it is hilarious that one of the most important annual gatherings of the global elite has to rely on local pizza shops and bakeries to host their spaces. I just have images in my mind of presidents meeting one another in a space that is usually the kitchen of a local entrepreneur’s pizza restaurant. It gives Davos a bit more of an ironic approachability.

I was curious what the financial details were behind these arrangements. Knowing the price of Swiss real estate generally, I imagine that Davos real estate is 10,000 - 15,000 CHF / square meter. I met a few people who either owned real estate on the Promenade or were privy to the details. All of them independently confirmed that these businesses or the building owners make more money in the one week of Davos than in the other weeks of the year combined. One person shared many of the building owners leave the spaces vacant for the rest of the year because having a tenant is not worth the hassle and doesn’t move the needle much. This means that Davos’s main street is a bit of a ghost town for the rest of the year.

The average event space was around 300-350 square meters. With an average cap rate of 4-5% (a wild guess on my part) this would imply an annual rent for these spaces of 250,000 - 300,000 CHF. I can venture to guess that the government of Mongolia paid Damia Pizza’s owner, or the building owner, at least 150,000-300,000 CHF for 5 days of use. For the larger spaces such as the house of India, Qualcomm, and the various venues inside of the Belvedere Hotel, these would have been much larger numbers.

The Security and Lack Thereof

Davos is simultaneously the most secure and least secure conference I have ever attended.

Given 50+ global leaders (presidents, PMs, Finance Ministers, Royal Families, etc.) are in town for the week, it makes sense that things should be safe. At the entrance of the town, there is a full artillery and I believe an anti-air system setup. This is a normal thing to see in Switzerland given how many military bases are scattered within the country’s mountainous terrain. You can expect to see Swiss military on public transit almost everyday throughout the country.

Official WEF facilities such as the Congress have airport-type security with x-rays, body scans, and military personnel on watch with rifles. These are very secure and require multiple identity and badge checks before you get into the event space.

But then the rest of the forum is dispersed across this small town as shared above. Everyone has to move between hotels, venue spaces, and the official WEF buildings multiple times a day. Given the traffic is basically at a standstill, many are forced to walk in streets that are completely open to the public. Real VIPs had security details surrounding them but many others strolled freely through town. I walked beside John Kerry, Paul Ryan, the Ukrainian Finance Minister, the German Finance Minister, and countless CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Most of them were just accompanied by a chief of staff and at most one bodyguard. Maybe I am overly cynical but to me this is an extraordinarily vulnerable place for these leaders. Again, the street and many of the venues have zero security and anyone can drive or ride the train into town.

The Cost

Switzerland is the most expensive place to live and visit in the world and Davos takes this to the next level. Here are a few observations I wrote down during the week (for reference 1 CHf = $1.10 USD):

• Small bag of Zfeifel Paprika potato chips (basically Lays for American readers) = 8.50 CHF

• Black coffee = 8 CHF

• Vegetarian Risotto at the Hostel Postli Restaurant = 48 CHF

• Negroni Cocktail = 22 CHF

Those are all relatively small numbers in comparison to the cost of accommodation in Davos. I was shared offers from a few hotels for a 4-night stay:

• Hotel Europe - 23,500 CHF. Normal rate is 200-300 / night

• Schatzalp - 27,500 CHF. Normal rate is 250-350 / night.

• Alpengold - 150,000 CHF. Normal rate is 500-800 / night

I ended up staying in Klosters (~30min train ride away) for 1/10th of the cost.

The Networking

Put simply, the networking opportunity Davos presents is second to none. If you are involved in any field relating to finance, development, politics, energy, science, or activism, then Davos will be packed with relevant people for you to meet. Everyone also knows this is the main use for the Forum and is eager to chat, whether it be in a line waiting for coffee or just sitting down at a random table somewhere. Given the cost and pain it takes to get to the WEF, everyone there is either quite senior in their field or has ponied up a lot of their own capital and wants to make it worth it. Getting a few dozen business cards per day is to be expected.

The relaxed security and overall mingling of people means you end up literally rubbing shoulders with some incredible people. I sat next to Larry Summers at lunch one day, took the train with the CEO of a very large global investment fund, stood in line with various Finance Ministers and journalists, and was never more than a few steps away and a brief “hello” from any decision maker out there. It is a special place to meet people that matter and have power. It serves that purpose incredibly well.

The Snake Oil & Societal Disconnect

I will end with the most negative takeaways I had from the week of WEF. To begin, the amount of snake oil and bovine excrement that is presented. This year was filled with presentations, panels, and interviews about AI. There were a handful of presentations by scientists and true technologists that almost all uniformly poured cool water on what many others had to say.

One of the most painful sessions to sit through was SandboxAQ’s lunch. Having never heard of the company before in my life, I was surprised to see Larry Summers, Deloitte’s CEO, Accenture’s CEO, EY’s CEO, JP Morgan Assset Management Chair, the former NSA Director, and other leaders in the room. While the lunch was served, the company CEO, Jack Hidary, went around the room interviewing various business leaders about their experience working with SandboxAQ’s products. Without exception, every person spoke about the products - none of which they ever actually described - were “game-changing” or “transformational” or “shifting the paradigm.” It was a bizarre experience and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the stories of Soviet apparatchiks going to the Kremlin to talk about how everything was going wonderfully in 1989. I don’t know if SandboxAQ is legitimate or not but these types of show-and-tell charades remind me of the dot com era and crypto mania. The business has raised nearly $1 billion but no one around at Davos (even at the AI House) knew anything about what the company actually did.

Other panels about AI, AI infrastructure, and other related topics were equally hard to listen to. In many ways it seemed it was a competition around who could say the biggest number in as many words as possible, without communicating any real ideas. Most speaker groups were people that could not tell you how a transformer or vector database works, let alone have the domain expertise to guide an entire organization on their AI strategy.

Another strange phenomenon I noticed was the randomness of the companies and people presenting. Of course, most companies and presenters were Fortune 500 or high-flying technology companies that carried plenty of credibility. But then you’d get interviews at the exclusive events with companies that were from a completely different league. I am not sharing this from a position of superiority that these companies don’t deserve to be on stage - any entrepreneur is more important than a politician, buerocrat, or non-risk taking individual - but I do wonder how some of these companies were selected. One example was at the Swedish Lunch, a long running and, seemingly, high caliber event, where the Swedish Finance Minister and others presented. One of the interviews was with the CEO of Bloom Energy which is a 24 year old company that has burned over $4B in its history and is one of the most volatile stocks in the public markets. Not once during the interview was the product or technology described. It was mostly a self-help style presentation about the journey of an entrepreneur. I feel that an event like Davos should have presentations with more substance, but maybe I am naive.

Lastly, spending a few days at the forum made me understand more clearly than ever why Trump won and why there’s been such a wide-sweeping shift to populist agendas around the world. It is hard to sit through panels at Davos, where people pontificate about subjects that do not matter to the everyday person. The elitist disconnect is tangible. Politicians demonize the voter base with dark predictions about the future if they don’t change their ways. Climate activists warn the future will be worse and everyone must sacrifice their well-being today. These along with other luxury beliefs are shared as gospel and then distributed around the world.

One of the most memorable panels was during the opening night, which coincided with Trump’s inauguration, where Niall Ferguson gave an opening monologue about how he had flown over directly from D.C. on a private jet with climate activists and politicians coming to Davos to talk about how bad of a decision the voters had made. While the audience was probably less of a stereotypical Davos Man audience, there were still many that either uncomfortably laughed at Niell’s commentary or were visibly annoyed by his presence. Ironically, the WEF started 54 years ago as a small dinner party to discuss global supply chains. It was meant to be a space for managers to share best practices and insights as it related to securing and maintaining global trade. Oh how the world has changed just a short five decades later as it reverts towards self-reliance, localization, and isolation.