World Economic Forum

The WEF was founded by University of Geneva business professor Klaus Schwab, who would go on to serve as its executive director and later the chair of its board of trustees. In April 2025, Schwab announced he would retire and step down from the board effective immediately. ² The move came after a whistleblower released a statement to the board accusing Schwab and his wife Hilde of engaging in “financial and ethical misconduct.” ³

History

The World Economic Forum (originally known as the European Management Forum) was founded in Switzerland in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, now an honorary business professor at the University of Geneva. With support from the Commission of the European Communities (a predecessor organization to the European Commission under the later European Union, Schwab organized a conference in Davos, Switzerland attended by hundreds of executives from major Western European companies, primarily to discuss the theory of “stakeholder capitalism” as an alternative to traditional business models. These annual conferences served as a meeting for business and political leaders over the following 50 years to discuss major economic and political events, including German reunification, the end of the Cold War, the end of South African apartheid, the aftermath of 9/11, and the 2008 Great Recession. ¹

Klaus Schwab

Klaus Schwab is the founder of the World Economic Forum. Schwab was born in Ravensburg, Germany in 1938 to Swiss parents. His family was monitored by the Gestapo and his mother was once arrested for speaking the Swiss-German dialect. Near the end of World War II, his family moved back to Switzerland, but later returned to West Germany. Schwab has always been a German citizen and is the only member of his immediate family without Swiss citizenship. ⁴

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Schwab worked for numerous engineering companies, eventually entering management. By the mid-1960s, Schwab had five degrees in engineering and economics. In 1971, he founded the World Economic Forum. The following year, he became a business professor at the University of Geneva. In 2003, he transitioned to an honorary role. ^{5 6}

From 1993-1995, Schwab was a member of the United Nations’ High-Level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development. From 1996-1998, he was vice-chairman of the United Nations Committee for Development Planning. He was formerly a member of the steering committee of the Bilderberg Meeting and is a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council. ^{5 7}

Succession Controversy

In 2003, former Costa Rica president Jose Maria Figueres Olsen became the first CEO of the WEF, succeeding Schwab in his leadership role. ⁸ The following year, Olsen resigned following revelations that he had accepted $900,000 in previously undisclosed consultancy fees from French telecommunications company Alcatel in violation of WEF rules. ⁹

Government Funding Controversy

Klaus Schwab and the WEF have been criticized for receiving funding from the Swiss government. In 2021, the Swiss government announced it was paying $2.7 million for security for the WEF despite the organization having hundreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves. Schwab has been criticized for earning around $1 million per year from the WEF, despite his criticisms of high executive pay. ^{10 11}

2025 Whistleblower Accusations

​In April 2025, the WEF initiated an internal investigation into Klaus Schwab following a whistleblower releasing allegations to the board of “financial and ethical misconduct” conducted by Schwab and his wife Hilde. The accusations, detailed in a letter to the WEF, included claims that Schwab used organizational funds for personal services such as private massages, directed junior staff to withdraw large sums of cash on his behalf, and manipulated the WEF’s global competitiveness report to favor certain governments. Additionally, Schwab was alleged to have encouraged staff to promote his candidacy for a Nobel Peace Prize. The letter also implicated Schwab’s wife, Hilde, accusing her of using WEF resources for luxury travel under the guise of official meetings and restricting access to the WEF-owned Villa Mundi property for personal use. In response to these allegations, the WEF’s board of trustees convened an emergency meeting, after which Schwab resigned as executive chair. The board appointed former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe as interim chair while searching for a permanent successor by January 2027. Both Klaus and his wife have denied all allegations, labeling them as unfounded and have threatened legal action. ^{12 13}

As of August 15, 2025, Larry Fink and André Hoffmann have been appointed as Interim Co-Chairs for the WEF. In a statement on the WEF’s website, the interim chairs commented “As the organization moves into a new chapter, we look ahead with clarity, purpose, and confidence in the Forum’s enduring mission.” ¹⁴

AFT Partnership

In a 2025  clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is seen announcing a partnership with the World Economic Forum. In the brief clip, Weingarten says the partnership will “Create a curriculum that will lead to good jobs and solid careers.” ¹⁵

Association with Epstein

In 2026, Børge Brende, president and chief executive of the World Economic Forum, resigned following an independent review into his past contacts with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The resignation came after the release of additional U.S. Justice Department files appeared to show that Brende had remained in contact with Epstein until at least mid-2019, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. ¹⁶

The Forum stated that the independent investigation did not find “additional concerns beyond what has been previously disclosed.” Brende said he stepped down after “careful consideration” so that the organization could continue its work “without distractions.” The Forum thanked him for his leadership during what it described as a “pivotal period of reforms.” ¹⁶

The “Davos Manifesto”

In 1971, Klaus Schwab described “stakeholder capitalism” to the World Economic Forum, a business theory that prioritizes “stakeholders” over “shareholders.” In standard modern economic theory, businesses exist for the sake of their owners (or shareholders for corporations) who invest their wealth on expectation of returns; stakeholder theory expands the understanding of business beneficiaries beyond shareholders to all individuals impacted by a particular business, including its employees, customers, suppliers, individuals impacted by environmental effects, and so forth. ^{17 18}

In 1973, attendees of the WEF’s annual conference drafted and signed a “code of ethics” for businesses based on stakeholder theory. The code would later become knows as the first “Davos Manifesto.” The code starts: ¹⁹

The purpose of professional management is to serve clients, shareholders, workers and employees, as well as societies, and to harmonize the different interests of the stakeholders. ¹⁹

For the 2020 annual conference, Schwab wrote the “Davos Manifesto 2020,” which updated the original manifesto’s principals. The first part of the code was updated to: ²⁰

The purpose of a company is to engage all its stakeholders in shared and sustained value creation. In creating such value, a company serves not only its shareholders, but all its stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, local communities and society at large. The best way to understand and harmonize the divergent interests of all stakeholders is through a shared commitment to policies and decisions that strengthen the long-term prosperity of a company. ²⁰

The update especially expanded corporate responsibility into broader social aims: ²⁰

A company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfils human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system. Performance must be measured not only on the return to shareholders, but also on how it achieves its environmental, social and good governance objectives. Executive remuneration should reflect stakeholder responsibility. ²⁰

The Great Reset

In June 2020, the World Economic Forum announced its 50^th annual conference, which was entitled the “Great Reset.” The WEF laid out ambitious plans to “reshape the world” after the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics, including voices from the mainstream media as well as far-right and far-left conspiracy theorists, have framed the Great Reset as an attempt by international elites to enhance their power over the global economy, either due to misguided benevolence or nefarious conspiracy. This critique has been encapsulated by the term “Great Reset,” which is now used as a general concept for elites seizing power during a time of crisis. ²¹

Systemic Problems Revealed by COVID-19

The Great Reset program was premised on the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed systemic weaknesses in the global economic and political system. First, it demonstrated the inverse relationship between economic activity and environmental health, since lockdowns generated positive environmental trends in some parts of the world. Second, the pandemic revealed social and economic inequalities, since the poor (both globally and within developed nations) faced harsher economic repercussions from the pandemic and the lockdowns. Third, the pandemic demonstrated the importance of economic value production, given the global GDP reduction caused primarily by the lockdowns. ¹⁷

Policy Proposals

The Great Reset proposed an array of policy suggestions to fix the systemic economic and political problems revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic with a “symbiosis between people, planet and profit,” as contrasted with a singular focus on profit. Supposedly, problems are primarily caused by private actors exploiting and consuming finite common resources which create externalities to the planet’s detriment. Thus, WEF’s Great Reset program calls for numerous measures which enhance the authority of governments and multi-national government organizations to regulate the economy and change the legal system. ²²

In a piece written by Schwab, he predicated the Great Reset agenda on three components. The first involved “changes to wealth taxes, the withdrawal of fossil-fuel subsidies, and new rules governing intellectual property, trade, and competition” to “steer the market toward fairer outcomes.” The second proposed using COVID-19 spending programs to advance “equality and sustainability” by “building ‘green’ urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics.” The third proposed expanding upon COVID-era teleconferencing, surveillance, and research and development strategies to advance the “public good” as part of Schwab’s theorized “fourth industrial revolution.” ²³

WEF proposes that though private actors are often morally in support of measures to restrain private control over resources for the sake of the greater good, they often forgo altruistic policies due to responsibility diffusion. A combination of corporate cultural changes and legal policies both to restrict and subsidize corporate behavior, are needed to shift global business to support the principals laid out in the Davos Manifesto and many of the tenets of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) theory. ^{17 24}

Additionally, businesses must form larger groupings and coalitions under government direction to “collaborate” on specific policy goals. For instance, deforestation and other environmental challenges can only be met through large-scale cooperative action, necessitating these coalitions. ¹⁷

Fourth Industrial Revolution

A major component of the Great Reset is a concept known as the “fourth industrial revolution” originally coined by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. ²⁵ This proposed fourth industrial revolution is driven by a fusion of technologies to create productivity breakthroughs, for instance in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and energy storage. The Great Reset argues that this revolution will be as disruptive to economic and political order as previous industrial revolutions, and therefore world leaders should use the pandemic to introduce legal and social reforms to smooth this new transition. ²⁶

Policy Impact

Many political leaders have endorsed some or part of the Great Reset proposals, including U.S. President Joe Biden, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. ²⁷

Some of President Biden’s early policies have been interpreted as having aligned with the Great Reset principles. President Biden increased the government’s commitment to fighting climate change by creating the new U.S. Special Envoy for Climate position and appointing former U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA), who participated in the WEF’s 2020 Great Reset conference and declared President Biden’s support for it. ^{28 29} President Biden’s Build Back Better Act, a proposal to expand the welfare state and the government’s power over the economy, has been described as a Great Reset-aligned initiative. ³⁰

Conspiracy Theories

The Great Reset has inspired conspiracy theories about global elites using the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to gain more power over the world’s economic, political, and social systems. Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that the pandemic itself was instituted for this purpose. ³¹

In October 2020, Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano wrote an open letter to then-President Donald Trump alleging a “global plan called the Great Reset” was created by “a global elite that wants to subdue all of humanity.” ³¹

The letter fit into numerous existing COVID-19 conspiracy theories. In November 2020, a video of Prime Minister Trudeau speaking at the United Nations circulated on Twitter in which he said the pandemic created an opportunity “to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality, and climate change.” ³¹

Some conspiracy theorists focused on the “fourth industrial revolution” concept as a concept to enslave humanity. On a YouTube video with hundreds of thousands of views, Spiro Skournas said: ³¹

This is not about saving the planet, this is not about equality, this is about control…They want to redefine what it means to be human and determine for you your role and your future of being essentially a transhumanist cyborg integrated into this new control grid…where we will be unable to distinguish organic life from artificial. We won’t even have access to our own thoughts or we’ll have access to them, but we won’t even be able to control our own thoughts and emotions because they’re going to do that for us because we’re going to be tied into their grid system. ³²