Publicly Elon Musk couldn’t care less about attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, but privately he has a history of being the ultimate pick-me guy, according to the WEF’s former head of communications.
“The Forum is very diplomatic. They’ve never shared the begging emails from Elon Musk when he was a bit younger trying to get his foot in the door to go to Davos,” Adrian Monck told Politico’s Power Play podcast on Monday. “But they do exist, and they’re pretty miserable and craven and pathetic.”
Every year, the WEF—a private international organization based outside Geneva, Switzerland—convenes its members and hundreds of leaders in business, government and civil society to discuss the world’s biggest challenges.
This year, the meeting is conflicting with incoming President Donald Trump’s inauguration, leading some MAGA loyalists to say there’s no point going to Davos since all the “real” action is taking place in Washington, D.C.
The forum has also long been the target of conspiracy theorists, who claim the gathering’s real goal is to create a new, tyrannical world government. That’s where Musk comes into it.
In Dec. 2022, amid online debate about whether the WEF was conspiring to reduce the world’s population, Musk took to his social media platform X to trash the gathering.
“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 wrote, using internet shorthand for “boring as f---.”
A couple of weeks later, Musk compared the WEF to the anonymous online message board 4Chan, and then mocked a video of founder Klaus Schwab’s 2023 welcome remarks.
“How is WEF/Davos even a thing? Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?” he wrote.
Organizers shot back saying the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX hadn’t been invited to the meeting since 2015.
Since then, Musk has poured his personal fortune into getting Trump elected, and has now set his sights on using his astronomic net worth to single-handedly reshape Europe’s entire political landscape.
Asked by Politico if he had personally seen Musk’s desperate emails, Monck said he knew the people who were in touch with Musk at the time and “who kept their counsel on that particular appearance.”
“It’s nothing particularly new,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who’ve turned their noses up at Davos who privately have tried every single ruse imaginable to get through the front door.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Musk’s representatives for comment.
