I know this is going to shock you, but a new whistleblower report contends World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab isn’t such a good guy.
If you were forming a large group of well-connected international business elites, you probably would rather not have a founder named “Klaus Schwab” who for some reason always looks and sounds like a James Bond villain.
Back in 2022, our MBD characterized the Davos conference as a “supervillain gathering.”
Schwab’s obsessions with global political cooperation, environmentalism, and “the fourth industrial revolution” — his idea that the next great leap in capitalist productivity will come from integrating technology with the human person itself — guarantees that the presentations will be a mix of utopian globalism that somehow combine visions of global austerity (to reduce carbon) with nightmares about a handful of corporate and political leaders having direct access to your amygdala.
For years, even the more capitalism-friendly corners of National Review have eyed Schwab with deep suspicion. Andrew Stuttaford contended “Schwab’s preoccupation with environmentalism, I’d guess, owes more to its use as an instrument of social control than to any worries about the Earth.”
Samuel Gregg warned, “wants a trinity of governments, businesses, and NGOs working together to pursue political goals that are always of the progressive variety. Schwab has even alluded to the neo-corporatism that remained influential in post-war West Germany as the blueprint for the political-economic model he has in mind.”
And James Lileks observed Schwab “always looks like the result of entering “Lutheran Undertaker” and “Natty Golem” in an AI art-generator.
You can’t always judge a man by appearances, but the combination of Schwab’s demeanor, rhetoric and global ambitions always made it easy to envision him with an iron fist and cat in his lap, raspily fuming, “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”
Well, I know this is going to shock you, but there’s some new evidence that Klaus Schwab isn’t such an honest guy:
World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab is under investigation by the organization he created after a new whistleblower letter alleged financial and ethical misconduct by the longtime leader and his wife.
The anonymous letter was sent last week to the Forum’s board and raised concerns about the Forum’s governance and workplace culture, including allegations that the Schwab family mixed their personal affairs with the Forum’s resources without proper oversight, according to the letter and people familiar with the matter.
It included allegations that Klaus Schwab asked junior employees to withdraw thousands of dollars from ATMs on his behalf and used Forum funds to pay for private, in-room massages at hotels. It also alleged that his wife Hilde, a former Forum employee, scheduled “token” Forum-funded meetings in order to justify luxury holiday travel at the organization’s expense.
Klaus Schwab in recent days argued against an investigation, telling board members that he denied the unsubstantiated allegations and that he would challenge them in a lawsuit, the people said.
…One allegation raised in the letter is the Schwab family’s use of Villa Mundi, a luxury property purchased before the pandemic by the Forum, next to the organization’s headquarters in Geneva.
Villa Mundi is a sprawling Modernist house built in the 1950s overlooking Lake Geneva. It was renovated over several years and opened as a meeting and conference center in 2023.
The whistleblower letter maintains that Hilde Schwab maintains tight control over use of the building and that portions of the property are understood to be reserved for private family access; the Schwabs deny the claim. The letter says the Forum paid about $30 million to purchase the property and another roughly $20 million to renovate it.
Wait, are you telling me that a powerful industrialist who wanted the private sector and the world’s governments to march in lockstep to ensure every human on earth behaved as he wished also believed that he was entitled to use an institution’s resources for his personal benefit? That’s unthinkable! It’s so unlike a guy like that!
The Wall Street Journal report does not specify whether that villa in Geneva is atop a vast underground lair where henchmen are putting the final touches on some superlaser or other weapon of doom.
Sometimes, you find corruption in the last person you’d suspect. And sometimes, you find it in exactly the guy you suspected from the moment you first laid eyes on him.
Either way, I don’t think Schwab expects anyone to talk.