This year the Bilderberg summit, now under way in Madrid, turned 70 years old. But the controversial and secretive gathering of the world’s elites shows no signs of slowing down.
For decades the Bilderberg meeting, where the rich and the powerful gather behind closed doors to talk about what ails the world, has been the subject – understandably – of conspiracy theories. In recent years, Bilderberg has sought to remake itself and open up a little: more Davos than Illuminati.
But it still raises hackles from many observers. Its beady eyes, twinkling with billionaires, are this year fixed firmly on the future. Specifically, the “future of warfare”. And with conflicts raging from Sudan to Ukraine to Gaza, it feels like it is the spirit of the age.
This grim subject is being thrashed out under the hum of police drones hovering over the hotel, making sure such luminaries as the king of the Netherlands and the head of Nato are safe inside. Even by Bilderberg standards, the security at this year’s conference is intense, but it managed to gear up even more when the Spanish king’s entourage swept into the venue past a traffic jam of police vans.
The heightened security is perhaps a reflection of the threats and “challenges” packed into the conference agenda: Russia, China, the Middle East, the climate – while the session on Ukraine, titled Ukraine and the World, has a worrying hint of a wider world war. And when the topic of the Changing Faces of Biology is being discussed by the CEO of Pfizer, the head of the EU Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and the man who led the Human Genome Project, you can almost hear the alarm bells over the police sirens.
The world of Bilderberg in 2024 throbs with threats; it’s what conference participant Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, recently described as “the weaponisation of everything”. It’s a world of “hybrid attacks” driven by disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence. There’s even a session on AI safety at this year’s gathering, one of two sessions devoted to AI, securing its place at the head of Bilderberg’s agenda.
The conference hall is heaving with tech luminaries, including the heads of Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, Mistral AI and Anthropic, making the event a high-level AI summit in its own right.
Many of these AI chiefs are tech optimists; Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, recently raved about AI “spreading consciousness to the stars”. But the contingent of US national security officials, who have flowed in from Washington for these talks, tend to take a more worldly and weaponised view of the subject. They’re led by the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, and Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They are joined by one of the US’s most senior soldiers, the supreme allied commander Europe, Christopher Cavoli, who warned recently that the conflict with Russia was shaping up to be a “long fight”. So the immediate future of war sounds like it’ll be more war.
It’s just sad that Henry Kissinger isn’t here to enjoy it. The elder statesman of Bilderberg died in November at the age of 100.
Certainly the world’s military – and the industries that surround it – take Bilderberg seriously. Gen Cavoli is taking time out from leading a “wholesale modernization” of Nato’s defense capabilities to attend the Madrid conference. His boss at Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, is attending his last Bilderberg as secretary general. His successor is hotly tipped to be Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch prime minister. Rutte is a Bilderberg regular, and doubtless the group will be delighted, though perhaps not surprised, if yet another of their charmed circle lands a top job.
The other prime minister here in Madrid is Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, who said recently that “openness is our greatest weapon” in free societies. “At its core,” she said, “openness represents getting rid of barriers that hinder the flow of information.”
Sadly, we won’t know if she talks at Bilderberg about openness, because of all the barriers hindering the flow of information. We do know that Kallas believes that on the battlefield, “Ukraine has out-innovated Russia, fielding entirely new weapons systems” – some of which will have been developed by the tech companies at this year’s conference.
Time magazine has dubbed Ukraine “an AI war lab”, and the Economist agrees, describing it as “a testing ground for companies like Anduril and Palantir” – the heads of both of these defense tech companies are here in Madrid.
The founder of Anduril Industries is Palmer Luckey, the designer of Oculus VR, who got bored of making headsets and wanted to build autonomous combat vehicles instead – so in 2017 he set up the defense contractor Anduril Industries, with investment from Founders Fund, which is run by the venture capitalist and Bilderberg insider Peter Thiel. Another of Thiel’s happy investments was in Palantir – the AI surveillance giant run by Alex Karp, who sits alongside his mentor, Thiel, on Bilderberg’s steering committee.
War is a fantastic opportunity for R&D; as Karp says: “There are things that we can do on the battlefield that we could not do in a domestic context.” Meanwhile in Palestine, Palantir technology is being used by the IDF “in support of war-related missions”. The onslaught has been excellent for the company’s bottom line. “Our products have been in great demand,” enthuses Karp.
Karp’s fellow Bilderberg insider and Pentagon favourite Eric Schmidt, who used to run Google, is said by Forbes magazine to have been so “inspired by Ukraine’s use of drones on the battlefield” that he has spent the past year “working on a secret military drone project”.
But for now, if Ukraine is to win the drone war, Schmidt says that it needs “sustained financial and technical support from Kyiv’s allies”. This sentiment will surely be echoed by Ukraine’s representative at the Madrid conference, the foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who will no doubt be doing his best to coax some extra billions out of the crowd.
This year’s Bilderberg is thick with senior ministers and EU commissioners, not to mention the heads of the European Investment Bank and the Bank of Spain. The event itself is being hosted by Ana Botín, the executive chair of Banco Santander, and the heads of numerous other finance giants are attending, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Societé Générale.
Big business tends to pick up the tab for Bilderberg, because it’s such a high-end investment opportunity. Bilderberg is the boardroom of the western alliance, so they get to participate in the shaping of the grand strategy and hopefully get a jump on the market.
It’s looking like next year’s host will be the Swedish billionaire investor Marcus Wallenberg, the chairman of defense company Saab. His senior adviser, Oscar Stenström, has been hovering round the venue as a member of the conference “pre-team”. Stenström was the chief negotiator for Sweden’s successful accession to Nato in March, and what better way to toast the ongoing expansion of the Alliance than with a Scandinavian Bilderberg. Skål!
