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Rachel Reeves might give the impression of being someone who’s never late for social engagements, but she is increasingly late to the party. At a breakfast event on the second day of Davos, after she’d spelled out her faith in artificial intelligence and a high-skilled workforce, someone asked Britain’s chancellor how she felt about “wealth creation” – was she relaxed, in a Blairite sense? “Absolutely,” Reeves replied. “Absolutely relaxed.”
Wealth creation isn’t quite the same as just wealth, but “wealth creators” is famously the moniker the super-rich use for themselves. And so Reeves’s exceedingly relaxed tone here puts her in a minority – possibly a minority of one. As Elon Musk salutes his way into political power, not even rich people are relaxed about wealth any more. On the first day of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the pro-tax campaign group Patriotic Millionaires released survey results from 2,000 high net-worth individuals across the G20: more than half of them thought extreme wealth was a threat to democracy, and over two-thirds agreed that the visible influence of the wealthy was leading to a decline in trust of the media, the justice system and democracy.
Even EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, speaking on the same day at Davos, seemed to recognise that the neoliberal dream that rich people’s interests were totally aligned with everyone else’s is over. She stated openly that the “cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality. Instead, we have entered a new era of harsh geostrategic competition”; she didn’t mention Donald Trump by name, but it wasn’t a secret.
Nobody at Davos is relaxed; not about wealth, not about anything; nobody, that is, except Rachel Reeves.
Davos sees itself as the home for the display-case version of the high net-worth individual, where you get close enough to almost touch them, and everyone can hear what they really think. In fact, the ultra-rich rarely feature on the panels and when they do, they’re always talking about philanthropy. Instead, you’re meant to watch academics, CEOs, very senior government ministers talk on panels, and simply infer what the rich people think.
In recent years, it hasn’t been unusual for those discussions to be quite stark. In 2023, for instance, speakers on one panel I went to spelled out the rationale for the proposition that we’re at the greatest risk of nuclear war since the Bay of Pigs. Climate change was a regular topic, and there tended always to be at least one realist in the room. In short, you were allowed to go to Davos and worry about the apocalypse. You’d be in good company, nobody there was daft (else how would they be rich?).
But these doom scenarios were just to soften you up to hear the solution, which was – great news, folks, because there are more of them every year – very rich people. They all looked forward to a future in which the climate emergency and hunger had been solved by technology and everyone was working smart to maximise their human potential. And it was always a misdirection: it relied on us, the watching public, being unable to distinguish between the rich and the super-rich. If you think of a billionaire as the same as a millionaire, you miss just how much wealth they’re hoarding, and you perhaps don’t think about how socially destabilising that can be. Once they’re elided, their dreams, values, interests and aims all sound the same, when they are nothing like the same. In a way, the entire corporate and tech conference circuit has been an exercise in the super-rich camouflaging themselves among the rich, a cloak of invisibility.
Often the only way you knew the billionaires from the millionaires at Davos was that, milling among the snow boots and the salopettes, there were guys in spotless, exquisite suits. This was because they got dropped to the front door of the event in a helicopter or skidoo, while everyone else had to trudge through snow. Probably the most high status thing you could do at Davos is walk around in your underwear, and I feel sure that one day a tech bro will do that.
Or at least, I used to feel sure: Davos is no longer necessary to the tech bro, because they have no further need of this camouflage. Billionaires are no longer pretending to have pro-social impulses. At the very top of the tree, they’ve captured the most powerful state in the world (Musk); they’re sacking their factcheckers (Mark Zuckerberg); or they’re being accused of muzzling the parts of the free press that they own (Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong); so the last thing they need is a cadre of ventriloquist dummies persuading the world they hold values they’ve discarded, building a brand for yesterday’s model.
Davos, whose purpose was only ever to sell the massive concentration of wealth among a tiny sliver of the human population as a public good, is now obsolete. In an Escher-esque fantasia spun by expense accounts and group delusion, it’s managed to both be the party and be late to the party. And Rachel Reeves is late even to that.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
