ReportWire

Tag: World Economic Forum

  • Davos Organizers: Musk Wasn’t Invited Despite What He Says

    Davos Organizers: Musk Wasn’t Invited Despite What He Says

    [ad_1]

    DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — The World Economic Forum says billionaire Elon Musk wasn’t on the guest list for the annual meeting of business executives, global leaders and cultural trend-setters in Davos, Switzerland — despite what the Twitter owner claims.

    Notables from European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen to actor Idris Elba are gathering in the ritzy Alpine town this week to talk about global issues ranging from war to climate change and technology’s effects on security.

    Musk wasn’t there, though he says he was invited. Forum spokesman Yann Zopf knocked that down Tuesday, saying the last time the Tesla CEO got an invitation was “not this year and not recently — last time in 2015.”

    Musk said in a tweet Dec. 22: “My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol.”

    He didn’t specify when he got the invitation, but the tweet’s timing suggested it was for this year. Musk did not immediately respond to requests from The Associated Press for comment Tuesday.

    Organizers did extend invitations to Musk, as the boss of Tesla, to join a few times in the 2010s — the last being in 2015 — but he never registered or attended the annual meeting, Zopf said.

    The gathering has been criticized for a lack of concrete action that emerges after a series of sessions and speeches, while the forum itself has been the target of online conspiracy theories from those who believe the meeting involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit.

    Multibillionaire Musk, one of the world’s richest people, can certainly afford to attend Davos.

    Forum members pay between 120,000 to 850,000 Swiss francs ($130,000 to $921,000) for annual memberships depending on the level of affiliation they want.

    Many executives trek to Davos to ride the coattails of the meeting and hobnob with corporate executives who flock to town, at times taking potshots at the forum from the sidelines. For example, Richard Branson, the British tycoon behind Virgin, has reputedly come to town several times without attending the meeting itself.

    TOPSHOT – Participants are seen during a session of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 17, 2023. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

    FABRICE COFFRINI via Getty Images

    Musk might be a bit busy to be palling around with the powerful in snowy Switzerland anyway.

    While still grappling with the fallout from buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk is facing trial over his tweet about taking Tesla private in 2018.

    Jury selection begins this week and he’ll have to explain his actions under oath in court in San Francisco after tweeting that he had lined up the financing to pay for a $72 billion buyout of the electric carmaker, which never happened. It culminated in a $40 million settlement with U.S. securities regulators that also required him to step down as the company’s chairman.

    He’s also planning to step down as CEO but remain owner of Twitter, which he succeeded in taking private last summer but has alienated some users and advertisers with chaotic job cuts and changes to content moderation policies.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The rich should pay higher fares to clean up aviation, says Heathrow boss | CNN Business

    The rich should pay higher fares to clean up aviation, says Heathrow boss | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    London
    CNN
     — 

    Rich travelers will have to pay more to fly if the aviation industry is to transition to greener fuels, the boss of one of the world’s biggest airports said Tuesday.

    Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos hosted by CNN’s Richard Quest, Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said that wealthy individuals and companies should pay extra to fly with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in order to bring the costs down for everyone else, particularly people in developing countries.

    He said that financiers and energy suppliers should invest in SAF production, including in emerging markets.

    “But as individuals and companies we need to be paying the premium for sustainable aviation fuels so that we can get the cost of it down so that the mass market and developing countries don’t have to pay for the energy transition. The wealthy people in this room and wealthy nations should be funding the energy transition in aviation to help support developing countries,” he added.

    Holland-Kaye said the solution to sustainable aviation was not to fly less, which was not necessarily an option outside Northern Europe, but to use cleaner sources of energy to travel.

    SAF is viewed as critical to reducing aviation’s carbon emissions but its green credentials come at a hefty price. Some airlines allow passengers to offset their CO2 emissions by paying more for their tickets to cover the extra cost of using SAF, but very few travelers currently make use of this option.

    Holland-Kaye said that companies can play a major role accelerating the adoption of SAF because business travel accounts for about 30% of fuel used in aviation. He cited the example of Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , which has an internal carbon tax for travel that requires each business unit to pay a fee based on its carbon emissions.

    Produced mainly from recycled food and agricultural waste, such as used cooking oil, SAF is a type of biofuel that cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared to conventional jet fuel.

    It also costs between two and eight times more than its fossil-fuel based alternative, which is why in 2019 it accounted for just 0.1% of jet fuel used in commercial aviation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey.

    In 2021, the industry pledged to replaced 10% of global jet fuel supply with SAF by 2030. This year, Virgin Atlantic plans to fly a Boeing 787 from London to New York powered solely by SAF in what has been billed as the world’s first net-zero transatlantic flight.

    Clean energy investments need a major boost if the world is to meet its climate goals, according to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a surge in investment in renewables as countries race to secure alternative energy supplies, but much more needs to be done, he said.

    Speaking on another Davos panel hosted by CNN’s Julia Chatterley earlier on Tuesday, Birol said that for every dollar invested in fossil fuels, the world is now investing $1.50 in clean energy. That needs to increase to $9 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, he added.

    — Anna Cooban contributed reporting.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • As elites gather in Davos, conspiracy theories gain traction online

    As elites gather in Davos, conspiracy theories gain traction online

    [ad_1]

    When some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures gathered at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last year, sessions on climate change drew high-level discussions on topics such as carbon financing and sustainable food systems.

    But an entirely different narrative played out on the internet, where social media users claimed leaders wanted to force the population to eat insects instead of meat in the name of saving the environment.

    The annual event in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos, which opens Monday, has increasingly become a target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus of commentators who believe the forum involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit. Experts say what was once a conspiracy theory found in the internet’s underbelly has now hit the mainstream.

    “This isn’t a conspiracy that is playing out on the extreme fringes,” said Alex Friedfeld, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League who studies anti-government extremism. “We’re seeing it on mainstream social media platforms being shared by regular Americans. We were seeing it being spread by mainstream media figures right on their prime time news, on their nightly networks.”

    The meeting draws heads of state, business executives, cultural trendsetters and representatives from international organizations to the luxe mountain town. Though it’s always unclear how much concrete action will emerge, the meeting is slated to take on pressing global issues from climate change and economic uncertainty to geopolitical instability and public health.


    Global economy could be in for a “tough year” in 2023, IMF chief warns

    05:27

    “The Great Reset”

    Hundreds of public sessions are planned, but the four-day conference is also known for secretive backroom meetings and deal-making by business leaders. This gap between what’s shown to the public and what happens behind closed doors helps make that makes the meeting a flashpoint for misinformation.

    “When we have very high levels of ambiguity, it’s very easy to fill in narratives,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and also studies misinformation.

    Theories about influential global leaders are not new, she said, but scrutiny of the forum and its chairman, Klaus Schwab, intensified in 2020 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year, the theme of the annual meeting was “The Great Reset.” The initiative envisioned sweeping changes to how societies and economies would work to recover from the pandemic and build a more sustainable future.

    Now, in increasingly mainstream corners of the internet and on conservative talk shows, “The Great Reset” has become shorthand for what skeptics say is a reorganization of society, using global uncertainty as a guise to take away rights. Believers argue that measures including pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates are tools to consolidate power and undercut individual sovereignty.

    Extremist beliefs take root

    In a time of mounting anxiety, Jamieson says the public has become more susceptible to falsehoods, as conspiracy theories emerge as a tool to cut through the chaos. Researchers who monitor extremism say these beliefs are becoming more popular and more concerning.

    At a rally staged on the grounds of an upstate New York church last fall, a photo of Schwab was displayed on the center of a large screen alongside other “villains” accused of threatening American values. The crowd of thousands had gathered in a revivalist tent at a traveling roadshow used as a recruiting tool for an ascendant Christian nationalist movement. Participants discussed “The Great Reset,” among a host of other theories, as an assault on America’s foundations.

    The phrase was used more than 60 times across all programs on Fox News in 2022, according to one tally generated by the Internet Archive’s TV news database. That’s up from 30 mentions in 2021 and about 20 in 2020. It was discussed most frequently on “The Ingraham Angle” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

    And in August, amid a defamation trial for calling the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack a hoax, Infowars host Alex Jones released a book called “The Great Reset: And The War For the World.” It’s described as an analysis of “the global elite’s international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.”


    Researchers warn TikTok is a growing source of misinformation

    04:55

    As the World Economic Forum has become intertwined with this narrative, a steady stream of claims have plagued the organization. While some people offer legitimate criticisms of the forum — namely that it hosts wealthy executives who fly in on emissions-spewing corporate jets — others spread unverified or baseless information as fact.

    For example, a site known for spreading fabricated stories falsely claimed last month that Schwab publicly encouraged the decriminalization of sex between children and adults, using an invented quote and other baseless statements. Still, it drew tens of thousands of shares on Twitter and Facebook.

    Bug eaters?

    Meanwhile, the popular claim that the forum wants people to replace meat with bugs is a distorted reference to an article once published on the organization’s website. In another instance, a widely shared post claimed without evidence that the forum had “appointed” U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House before the actual vote had taken place.

    The concern, Friedfeld says, is that posts like these could introduce people to more fringe and dangerous conspiracy theories or even translate into real-world violence. Yann Zopf, head of media for the forum, says the organization has increased its monitoring of this kind of online activity and carefully watches for direct threats.

    “Creating all that kind of stuff can generate enemies that people believe are responsible for whatever bad thing is happening in the world,” Friedfeld said. “Once that happens, when you believe that that things are happening in the world and a certain person or group of people is responsible for these attacks, all of a sudden, the idea of using violence to resist becomes more plausible.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The top 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world over last two years | CNN Business

    The top 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world over last two years | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The world’s wealthiest residents have been getting far richer, far faster than everyone else over the past two years.

    The top 1% have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world during that period, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report, released Sunday. Their fortune soared by $26 trillion, while the bottom 99% only saw their net worth rise by $16 trillion.

    And the wealth accumulation of the super-rich accelerated during the pandemic. Looking over the past decade, they netted just half of all the new wealth created, compared to two-thirds during the last few years.

    The report, which draws on data compiled by Forbes, is timed to coincide with the kickoff of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, an elite gathering of some of the wealthiest people and world leaders.

    Meanwhile, many of the less fortunate are struggling. Some 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. And poverty reduction likely stalled last year after the number of global poor skyrocketed in 2020.

    “While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. “Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest.”

    Though their riches have slipped somewhat over the past year, global billionaires are still far wealthier than they were at the start of the pandemic.

    Their net worth totals $11.9 trillion, according to Oxfam. While that’s down nearly $2 trillion from late 2021, it’s still well above the $8.6 trillion billionaires had in March 2020.

    The wealthy are benefiting from three trends, said Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s director of economic justice.

    At the start of the pandemic, global governments, particularly wealthier countries, poured trillions of dollars into their economies to prevent a collapse. That prompted stocks and other assets to soar in value.

    “So much of that fresh cash ended up with the ultra-wealthy, who were able to ride this stock market surge, this asset boom,” Ahmed said. “And the guardrails of fair taxation weren’t in place.”

    Also, many corporations have done well in recent years. Some 95 food and energy companies have more than doubled their profits in 2022, Oxfam said, as inflation sent prices soaring. Much of this money was paid out to shareholders.

    In addition, the longer term trends of the unwinding of workers’ rights and greater market concentration is heightening inequality.

    By contrast, global poverty increased greatly early in the pandemic. Though some progress in poverty reduction has been made since then, it is expected to have stalled in 2022, in part because of the war in Ukraine, which exacerbated high food and energy prices, according to World Bank data cited by Oxfam.

    It’s the first time that extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously in 25 years, said Oxfam.

    To counter this growing inequality, Oxfam is calling on governments to raise taxes on their wealthiest residents.

    It proposes introducing one-time wealth tax and windfall taxes to end profiteering off global crises, as well as permanently increasing taxes on the richest 1% of residents to at least 60% of their income from labor and capital.

    Oxfam believes the rates on the top 1% should be high enough to significantly reduce their numbers and wealth. The funds should then be redistributed.

    “We do face an extreme crisis of wealth concentration,” Ahmed said. “And it’s important before all, I think, to recognize that it’s not inevitable. A strategic precondition to reining in extreme inequality is taxing the ultra-wealthy.”

    The group, however, faces an uphill battle. Some 11 countries cut taxes on the rich during the pandemic. And efforts to hike levies on the wealthy fell apart in the US Congress in 2021, even though Democrats controlled both chambers and the White House.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Davos draws record crowds, but its relevance is fading | CNN Business

    Davos draws record crowds, but its relevance is fading | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    London
    CNN
     — 

    For decades, business leaders, billionaires and politicians have gathered in Davos, Switzerland under the banner of forging ties that can help solve global problems.

    It’s a glitzy exercise often criticized as out of touch. It also looks increasingly out of date as the biggest war in Europe since 1945 turbocharges splits in the world economy.

    This year’s World Economic Forum, hosted in the Alpine ski town since the early 1970s, kicks off Monday. It’s expected to draw a record 2,700 attendees, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and US climate envoy John Kerry.

    Yet the WEF’s first winter meeting in Davos since 2020 comes as economic heavyweights are playing by different rules, with companies moving supply chains closer to home, strategic stockpiling picking up pace and corporate executives who once extolled free trade appearing increasingly wary of rising geopolitical risks.

    “I think Davos is totally irrelevant,” said Rana Foroohar, a Financial Times columnist, whose book “Homecoming” argues that a new shift toward localization is displacing the forces of globalization that have been dominant over the past half century.

    WEF makes the case that its conference allows decision makers to zoom out and collaborate, a challenge as they battle concurrent, compounding crises such as the pandemic, the soaring cost of living, climate change, food insecurity and war.

    “Only personal interaction creates the necessary level of trust, which we need so much in our fractured world,” WEF Chair Klaus Schwab, the founder of the event, said at a press conference last week. This year’s theme is “Cooperation in a Fragmented World.”

    Schwab’s vision for a progressively interconnected global economy that also spreads democracy around the world has been under threat at least since the 2008 financial crisis. Data from the World Bank shows that global trade of goods and services as a percentage of total economic output peaked that year. Outflows of cross-border investment hit a high in 2007.

    But damage to the Davos mission has accelerated over the past 12 months.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine squashed what columnist Thomas Friedman once termed the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which argued that no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants would go to war with each other. Since the invasion, more than 1,000 Western companies have curtailed operations in Russia, and Europe swiftly cut ties with what was once its top energy supplier despite the high costs. WEF itself had to freeze relations with Russia after hosting its politicians and oligarchs for years.

    Tensions between the world’s two biggest economies, the United States and China, now loom even larger, especially as Beijing ramps up military exercises aimed at menacing Taiwan. China’s strong-arm approach to containing Covid-19 also spooked companies and investors. Many remain wary even as restrictions are rolled back rapidly.

    That’s pushing businesses and governments to rethink supply chains for key products, as reducing vulnerabilities and protecting national interests takes precedence over maximizing cost savings.

    Where former US President Donald Trump used to champion “America First” trade policies, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been emphasizing “friendshoring,” or strengthening trade ties with countries like India, a fellow democracy. Apple

    (AAPL)     is looking to move more of its production outside China, whose labor market once served as an engine of its success. The European Union is reportedly drawing up plans to hoard scarce drugs so it can avoid future shortages.

    At the same time, the United States is pushing ahead with a robust industrial strategy aimed at boosting its prowess in manufacturing everything from computer chips to electric vehicle parts. That’s triggered a dispute with Europe, which worries new subsidies will put its companies at a disadvantage.

    “This really is a paradigmatic shift in this moment,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale management professor who speaks regularly with many well-known executives. He said they’ve increasingly been talking about cutting deals and making investments using this new playbook.

    Meanwhile, nationalism and populism — which can encourage leaders to criticize tenets of a globalized economy such as porous borders and lower barriers to trade — remain muscular forces. Just look to Italy’s new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who was installed in October. Her party’s agenda is rooted in skepticism of the European Union and anti-immigration policies.

    The consequences of this transition are still playing out. While the trend towards deglobalization is expected to have some negative consequences, such as adding to inflation, Foroohar sees an opportunity to reinvigorate communities that lost out on jobs during the free-trade bonanza, reduce the carbon footprints of supply chains and ease crippling global inequality.

    During the past two years, the richest 1% scooped up nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world, according to an Oxfam report published ahead of Davos.

    “Economic pendulums shift throughout history,” said Foroohar, who is also a CNN analyst. “Every time the pendulum shifts too far, which it clearly has, it starts to shift back a bit.”

    Some core elements of globalization remain intact. The digital transformation of economies makes it easier for money and ideas to move across borders. The same, unfortunately, goes for viruses and other diseases. International cooperation is essential to solve food shortages and keep high-stakes climate goals within reach.

    “It’s basically too simple to say it’s an era of globalization or an era of deglobalization,” said Markus Kornprobst, a professor of international relations at the Vienna School of International Studies. “It’s an in-between era.”

    But even Davos organizers seem aware of the changing tides. Panels on the agenda include sessions titled “De-Globalization or Re-Globalization?” and “Keeping the Lights on amid Geopolitical Fracture.”

    The forum will still draw big names. Top CEOs such as JPMorgan Chase’s

    (JPM)     Jamie Dimon, Microsoft’s

    (MSFT)     Satya Nadella, Uber’s

    (UBER)     Dara Khosrowshahi and BP’s

    (BP)     Bernard Looney are on the list of attendees; Scholz, von der Leyen and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will give speeches from the main stage.

    Yet there will also be notable absences. Those skipping the gathering this year include US President Joe Biden, China’s Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. That raises questions about whether Davos can hang on to its reputation an essential event for the rich and powerful.

    — Hanna Ziady contributed reporting.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • IT giant HCL Tech now leans on ‘start-up partners’ whenever stuck with a problem

    IT giant HCL Tech now leans on ‘start-up partners’ whenever stuck with a problem

    [ad_1]

    Start-ups have changed the way companies think and operate. And now, even large enterprises rely on them to come up with unique solutions. One such example is Indian IT giant, HCL Technologies. The company, founded by Shiv Nadar, has evolved with the emergence of the start-up ecosystem, says Achyut Chandra, Manager and Lead at HCL’s Open Innovation vertical.
     
    Speaking to Business Today at T-Hub’s ‘Corporate Innovation Conclave’ on Wednesday, Chandra explained that now when the company encounters a problem they turn to their “start-up partners” for solutions because they help them “solve the problems quickly”.
     
    “As an organisation grows, the power to make changes slows down,” he highlighted, adding that the processes are too lengthy to execute any change quickly sometimes. This is where start-ups step in. 
     
    “Eight years ago we realised that innovation can be brought out by external forces as well,” he highlighted. This epiphany, he said, later led to the launch of HCL’s open-innovation program called eSTIP. eSTIP has so far partnered with over 1,000 start-ups, eight venture capitalists, among other things.
     
    Chandra noted that when Indian corporates started realising the value coming from this segment, they started “decentralising innovation” and that is in turn slowly opening the way for innovation to come from all corners of the country including the hinterlands. 

    Chandra also pointed out that exciting times are coming up for the Indian business ecosystem especially with the launch of 5G or fifth generation. 
     
    This will, especially, bolster the internet economy, according to him. “Stable and high-speed connectivity will give a push to the creator economy and the start-up ecosystem. While the former will create more content, the latter will be able to produce more solutions.”
     
    Chandra said that start-ups are significant to the growth of the country, he also shared some larger plans that are there on the cards. He said that the IT giant wants to place its bets on deeptech technologies such as quantum computing and quantum communications in the coming times along with a special emphasis on sustainability. The company is hiring individuals which are digitally savvy and can add to the organisation’s plans. 
     
    In May this year, HCL partnered with World Economic Forum to commit $15 million to support “acquapreneurs” and innovation happening in the fresh resource management segment. 
     
    Chandra concluded by saying that India’s open innovation ecosystem has come a long way and collaborations between corporates and start-ups are going to increase and become only stronger in the times to come. 
     

    [ad_2]

    Source link