- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady in Davos on promises, threats, and insults from Trump.
- The big story: Trump on oil, Russia, and the Fed.
- The markets: All-time high!
- Analyst notes from Goldman Sachs and Wedbush.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning from Davos, on the final day of the World Economic Forum. The big news yesterday was the virtual session with President Donald Trump. He said plenty, from promises of prosperity and threats of tariffs to an accusation against Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon that their companies refuse to bank with conservatives. (Yes, both denied it.) What’s not shown on the WEF video: the nervous laughter when Trump veered into hyperbole and insults against the outgoing Biden administration. As one U.S. CEO told me afterwards, “it feels unnecessary when the wind is already at his back.”
Besides getting semi-crushed by the media scrum around Argentine President Javier Milei as I sat with a source, politics is mainly a backdrop in discussions about how business leaders are managing everything from climate change to deploying AI. (I’ll share more insights from those interviews in the coming days.)
For Christian Ulbrich of JLL, a global real estate consultancy with 110,000 employees, one challenge is navigating a thicket of changing regulations such as a German law that requires companies to monitor hours and enforce breaks for remote workers, which cut JLL employee productivity there by 20%, to state regulations around building in places like New York and California. The biggest issue for CEOs, he argues, is not knowing what’s next. “We usually need to operate in a framework that’s pretty steady,” he says. “What's right today may be wrong tomorrow and that is a risk to the US economy.”
Overall, the mood in Davos was extremely optimistic around AI. Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn ended our roster of events with a conversation about the perks and perils with AI pioneer Andrew Ng and Signal president Meredith Whittacker (a longtime critic of what she calls “surveillance capitalism”). Leaders need to think about the risk of unintended consequences in giving generative agents access to data, they said.
Our annual CEO dinner was the most fun I had in a week of truly stimulating conversation. In an era seemingly filled with caricature heroes and villains, here was an opportunity to meet global leaders from business, government and NGOs, and connect with them on a real, human level to talk about what’s next. (I kept running into singer/entrepreneur Aloe Blacc and RBC CEO Dave McKay.)That’s why we create our own opportunities to gather, from Fortune’s annual New York dinner on March 18, to the Fortune Global Forum, which will take place this year in Riyadh, on October 26-27. And we’ll have many other dinners and gatherings, too. I hope you’ll join the conversation.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady, diane.brady@fortune.com, or on Linkedin. More news below …
