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Davos is So Back

January 24, 2026·45 min·4 clips

Why has Davos, once dismissed as irrelevant, become the most important gathering since 2008?

Davos is back, apparently. Felix opens with a fake alpine dispatch, then cuts the joke by admitting the panel is in New York City. That sets the tone. Davos comes across as the place where business news and television pageantry bump into each other in public. The old Davos sounded absurd. Felix remembers booking a Eurovision studio in the media center and acting like he could decode the whole conference. Then there is the refugee run. His description of the simulated camp, the phone surrender, the blindfolds, the dark passage, and the gunfire makes it sound like empathy curdled into self-parody. Felix says he never met a single person who did it. The sharper bit is that everyone knew it existed, everyone laughed at it, and Davos still kept staging this kind of thing. Now the mood feels different. Felix says the conference no longer seems like pure self-parody, whatever else the panel thinks of it. The CNBC coats prove the smaller, funnier point. A simple question about why anchors wear heavy outerwear turns into a quick lesson on the cost of moving live television to a Swiss mountain. If a network hauls the whole operation to Davos, Felix argues, it wants the sky, the mountains, and a set that makes the trip visible. That choice has a price. Guests can handle five cold minutes in a suit jacket. Anchors are stuck outside for hours, so they need coats. Spectacle is part of how the thing works. Even the Heathrow aside keeps poking at the same idea: tiny operating details can give away the bigger habits.

As heard by us

A sharp Slate Money episode on Davos, media theater, and the odd rituals around business power.

Slate Money uses Davos as a test case for how business power performs for the camera. Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spires, and Emily Peck ask why the annual alpine gathering feels newly relevant after years of sliding into self-parody, then linger on the details that make the…

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Why you'd press play

Davos is back, and you will want to know why the CNBC anchors all look so cold.

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