Globalists Gone Wild

DAVOS, Switzerland — Among the legions of well-connected and well-to-do people who spent the week here at the World Economic Forum, there is a small corps of people whose week of networking is not even close to over.

These people—even more monied and more connected than the typical Davos devotee—will depart the Swiss Alps and fly, in most cases by private jet, directly to Washington, where Alfalfa weekend is about to begin. That’s an annual black-tie gathering where current and past players in the nation’s capital invite corporate titans to join them for a dinner and satirical roasts. Beyond the dinner, which George W. Bush and Mitt Romney are expected to attend, there is a full slate of ancillary events Friday evening through midday Sunday.

Among those making the trek this year to both Davos and Alfalfa is Apple CEO Tim Cook. Same with private equity investor David Rubenstein and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

It is an odd choice in a way. After a week of nonstop panels and interviews and receptions and handshakes and air kisses, days and nights that blur into one with typically too much drink and too little sleep, you would think even titans of technology, finance, and politics might want to throw on sweatpants and flop on the couch at home with a cup of herbal tea.

And perhaps these modern moguls do want that. But there is something they plainly want more: confidence that if other important people are gathering somewhere they will not be left out and missing potentially valuable action.

The Davos-Alfalfa pairing serves as a kind of unofficial launch of what is now a yearlong season of corporate and political networking among a certain set of the world’s most influential people. Davos is by far the largest and most celebrated of these conclaves. But there are others that are more intimate and more exclusive.

For a certain set of corporate globe-trotters, they can take their pick of a retreat or conference or other elite convergence every couple weeks or so. No one goes to them all, but most of these players go to many more than a few. For tech and finance executives like Dimon, Brad Smith at Microsoft, or Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook (all of whom were at this year’s Davos) playing the polished and articulate ambassador in these arenas is now an important part of the job description atop high-profile companies with global concerns.

But Davos and its kin also illuminate something more fundamental about human nature.

Here’s a hypothetical that anyone with the usual quotient of ambitions and insecurity might ask themselves: Do you think you could ever become so successful, so confident in your wealth and your professional relationships, that you would no longer worry about any of this stuff? That you would not compare your achievements to other people’s, that you would no longer wonder whether you were in the right place because you believe that the coolest place is exactly wherever you happen to be?

This question, by the way, almost certainly has a correct answer: No. You would not ever have enough attainments that you would no longer be haunted by these nagging concerns of the sort that are on such vivid display at Davos. Here you can witness even CEOs and White House aides standing in line to be cleared by some attractive young person with an iPad in hand into this or that party, as though it were Studio 54 in the 1970s and Mick and Bianca Jagger were being ushered through the door.

Of course, it’s hypothetically possible that someone could be so temperamentally at peace that he or she would shimmy the greasy pole of credentialism and meritocracy and be fully satisfied once reaching a certain height. But it’s doubtful such a person would ever start shimmying the greasy pole in the first place.

It is this basic human instinct—that hunger to be in the room where it happens, as glorified by the musical Hamilton—that has fueled what is now a large industry of high-level socializing. This includes not just the top corporate, political and media leaders but a vast profession of public relations professionals, who are devoted both to helping instill certain gatherings with an exclusive mystique that makes influential people want to go, but also to writing the speeches and securing the interviews that will make influential people look good once there.

Where is there? Let’s make a partial list.

The weekend after Alfalfa is the Super Bowl, which increasingly has become a magnet for high-level corporate socializing. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has agreed to be the disc jockey for a Sports Illustrated party at The Fontainebleau hotel in Miami.

A couple weeks later, many of the same corporate and public policy leaders at Davos will be back to Europe for the Munich Security Conference. Then comes the more techy and media-oriented South by Southwest weekend in Austin in March.

In the spring, Washington is again a magnet for corporate leaders at media events like the white-tie-and-tails Gridiron Dinner, and the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, which has ballooned into 72 hours of parties.

The Milken conference in Los Angeles every spring is dominated by financial types. Microsoft has a CEO summit in Seattle in May.

Come the summer Google essentially has its own version of Davos attended by CEOs and the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Prince Harry and Barack Obama at its annual “camp” in Sicily. Closer to home there is the Aspen Ideas Festival, which draws some CEOs but also is a magnet for writers and public policy experts. Folks there welcome publicity. But working press is not welcome at the more exclusive Allen and Co. conference of media and tech leaders every July in Sun Valley. Invitees are encouraged to bring their families, and child care is provided.

There are few reports of kids hanging out at the anachronistic Bohemian Grove, the longtime male retreat in the redwoods of Northern California, which in the past has attracted U.S. presidents and still draws a well-connected crowd for its summer retreats.

The list of social-connection hubs also includes gatherings that aren’t on any official roster. The late financier Ted Forstmann years ago began a summer gathering of golf and discussion panels in Aspen that grew to include top tech executives like Eric Schmidt, when he was atop Google, and Hollywood types like Ron Howard and Michael Ovitz. Since Forstmann’s death in 2011, entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (brother of former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel) has helped continue the tradition.

Recently, famed producer David Geffen has expanded the places where important people like to be included by extending invitations to cruise the Mediterranean on his 453-foot Rising Sun yacht. Among those who made the cut last summer were former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, and actor Tom Hanks.

In one sense, this phenomenon is not new. In the 1950s, sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote a bestseller, The Power Elite, his book describing how interlocking networks of business, military and political elites created a small but influential class that made democracy as learned in civics class mostly an illusion. In the 1970s, conspiracy theorists loved to fulminate about the Trilateral Commission, in which people like David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger supposedly ruled the world. (Still exists, by the way, as does the annual Bilderberg Conference.)

But Mills was describing power as it worked in the shadows. The modern descendants are the opposite—infused with media and celebrity. A vast swarm of reporters this year covered Davos, and one reason CEOs come is to give interviews to the likes of CNBC. (Sheryl Crow sang at Davos this year at an event for Philip Morris.) Geffen posted pictures of his yacht cruise on Instagram.

What’s more, modern social circles are actually highly porous. Unlike previous eras, you don’t need a distinguished family lineage to be an insider. It does help to have a private plane, a gift for name-dropping, and a willingness to spend money on philanthropic causes. This is how one of modern culture’s most odious figures, the wealthy pervert Jeffrey Epstein, was able to insinuate himself into social circles that included such respectable figures as Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers. Gates and Summers were surely right in their later protests that they were not actually friends with him, despite posing for photographs and sharing private plane rides. But that in its own way makes the point about the superficiality and manipulation inherent in some high-level socializing.

A creep like Epstein is hardly typical. But the more commonplace merger of social ambitions with professional roles on the elite convening circuit highlights both appealing and demeaning dimensions of human nature.

On the positive side, people are social creatures—they like to be liked—and most of the events on the annual elite calendar are, in part, genuinely devoted to discussion of ideas and ways to make humanity better. WEF’s long-time slogan is, “Committed to improving the state of the world.”

At the same time, Davos and its ilk exist because of what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, a leading intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, termed “invidious distinctions.” People like to have things others don’t, and exclusivity makes some prizes more appealing than they might be on their merits.

One person skilled at navigating this reality is Anthony Scaramucci (yep, same guy who worked a few hours for Donald Trump) and, beginning a decade or so ago, became a Davos star.

In an interview here, Scaramucci held up his iPhone as one explanation for “the proliferation of conferences,” (a proliferation that includes his own “SALT” conferences, described on the website as a “global thought leadership forum.”) People spend their days talking and texting on the phone, but crave deeper interaction than “talking to a black mirror” of the smartphone. “We have a social need to interact with each other directly.”

Scaramucci vaulted to relevance at Davos with his wine receptions, a coveted event featuring rare vintages. “Rich people are snobs, and they also are cheap” so they wanted in on his reception, he said. “I’m nouveau riche, so I’m not cheap” and was willing to spend lavishly on the good stuff to draw an influential crowd.

He discounts the psychological dimension of Davos. “I don’t think Bill Gates has FOMO,” he said, fear of missing out. Maybe not. A regular attendee of Davos, Gates was originally scheduled to host an event on his international aid work but then switched plans. There likely were few people at Davos who would not accept an invitation to travel to him if he really wants to see them.

Still, there are very few people, no matter how accomplished, who won’t occasionally find themselves on the outside, with nose pressed against the window. After the Alfalfa dinner, for instance, many attendees typically adjourn to an after-party at Georgetown’s Café Milano. This year, however, that crowd will be thinner, as some attendees are invited to a competing after-party at Bezos’ mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood. Did you make the cut?

I didn’t, for either Alfalfa or the Bezos party. I’ll be home flopped on the couch with a cup of herbal tea.