Before we sink into what is happening at the World Economic Forum, take a moment to appreciate the stunningly successful media business that is the World Economic Forum.
The WEF’s biggest financial problem these days is too much cash. It’s become a little embarrassing, in fact, for a Swiss non-profit to be sitting on a Scrooge-McDuck pile of Swiss francs that employers are paying to get delegates. Business partnerships begin at CHF 15,000 ($17,600), a spokesman said, and go up to CHF 600,000 ($705,000) for the annual subscriptions that include the right to spend tens of thousands more on tickets, as of 2017.
And so the Forum has been quietly buying some of the world’s most expensive real estate, in this case 300 km west in tony Cologny on the left bank of Lake Geneva.
According to Swiss property records that Semafor reviewed with the help of a reporter for the Swiss magazine Beobachter, Otto Hostettler, the Forum bought two properties on Cologny’s lakeside Chemin de Ruth in 2012 for a combined 24 million francs, adding to its existing compound. Another building, bought more recently in a transaction whose details weren’t immediately available, became its Villa Mundi conference facility. (The purchases have the side benefit of connecting WEF head Klaus Schwab’s home to his office, per the Davos critic Peter Goodman.)
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www.semafor.com/article/01/14/2024/inside-the-davos-cash-machine