As Always With Davos, A Question of Who Gets to Be in the Room
This year, over 50 heads of state are in attendance, as well as about 1,600 business leaders.

As millions of eyes were turned toward Monday’s inauguration of Donald Trump, another well-heeled event was getting underway a few thousand miles away. This week marks the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum—a gathering of billionaires, hosted in the Swiss Alps—known affectionately as “Davos,” the town where it all takes place.
The Davos WEF, first held in 1971, is ostensibly designed to bring together some of the world’s sharpest minds to discuss the most pressing threats we’re collectively facing: economic recessions, global warming and wars, for example.
It might be better known, however, as an opportunity for some of the richest and most famous people across business, politics and culture to chinwag: the CEOs of Wall Street banks and tech behemoths, but also musicians and movie stars. Bono, Leonardo DiCaprio and Will.i.am have all made appearances in the past. This year, over 50 heads of state are in attendance, as well as about 1,600 business leaders.

It’s hard to look at Davos and miss the glaring inequality about who gets to be in the room. No wonder, then, that it has long served as an impetus for social justice advocates to call out corporate-driven inequality and greed, and the extent to which global wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. This year that’s no different.
On the eve of the meeting, just as some of the world’s most influential political and corporate leaders were arriving in the snowy ski resort, Oxfam, the anti-poverty organization, published a damning report. The timing, as you might’ve guessed, was no coincidence.
In it, Oxfam notes that the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires—rocketed to a staggering $2 trillion last year—that’s three times faster than in 2023. Oxfam found that 204 new billionaires were minted in 2024. In the U.S. alone—where wealth concentration is particularly high—the net worth of billionaires swelled by about $3.9 billion on average each day last year and 74 new billionaires emerged.
“The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable,” said Oxfam’s International Executive Director Amitabh Behar. “The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated—by three times—but so too has their power,” he added.
One particularly striking—and very topical—statistic in the report relates to the newly-inaugurated U.S. president.
According to Oxfam, Trump’s team is the wealthiest in history to run the U.S. government. It will have a combined net worth of more than $450 billion. As of this past weekend, at least 13 billionaires had been appointed to jobs in his administration, Oxfam calculated, and even excluding Elon Musk, who according to Reuters, splashed out $259 million to help Trump clinch the November election, the cabinet would be the richest in history.
For now Musk has an estimated net worth of about $427 billion, making him the richest person on the planet, followed by the Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos, at around $237 billion. Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, comes in third with around $211 billion. All three were guests at the inauguration on Monday.
“We present this report as a stark wake up-call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few,” Behar said.
Needless to say, the gender gap is particularly stark at the highest end of the wealth spectrum. The richest woman in the world, according to Forbes, is currently Alice Walton, heir to the Walmart Fortune. But her net worth, at a mere $100 billion, means she only ranks 17th in Forbes’ list of global billionaires.