The Madness of Billionaires
It's possible that Davos attendees are as insane as Trump
I’ll start today’s festivities by relaying something reported in the New York Times’ Dealbook newsletter by Andrew Ross Sorkin:1
C.E.O.s made sure to wait for Trump to arrive at a gathering he summoned them to, Lauren Hirsch reports from Davos, with some canceling other meetings out of fear of offending the president by leaving early.
Jane Fraser, Citigroup’s C.E.O., missed part of her own bank’s cocktail reception to wait for Trump, according to two people with knowledge of the event, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about it.
Many attendees remained on edge. Executives walking into client meetings had to gauge the temperature to figure out what was safe to say on Greenland, energy or any other political topic. At various lunches, business leaders traded notes on the best way to announce corporate news without offending the Trump administration.
Many feared saying anything on the record that the administration could construe as negative, leading to some tongue-twister answers.
American CEOs aren’t doing what you and I are doing.
They’re not watching Trumpanzee butcher the English language and common logic while saying, “I wonder if anyone is thinking about the 25th Amendment yet.”
Instead, they’re saying stuff like this:
I’m always just trying to listen and try to very authentically recognize patterns and through pattern recognition, figure out how we can find opportunities that serve the administration with where their priorities are.
And the only way to do that is to listen carefully and consistently and find that pattern recognition as best you can.
That was GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik twisting himself into the DNA helix of a crazy person as he tried to explain to his eager audience in a Davos session what he was looking for in the day’s scheduled Trump speech.
American CEOs were lining up to meet with a man whose brain has, by any objective standards, turned into roadkill. Many videos have emerged, beginning with his rambling pre-Davos press conference and through his Davos “speech”2, that reveal a dementia patient who, if he were your family member, would be wheeled into a hospice for the criminally insane.
Yet in Davos, CEOs are saying things like, “Find that pattern recognition as best you can.”
I suppose I should try to be fair by pointing out that CEOs act this way out of fear. Brian Moynihan, the C.E.O. of Bank of America, was de-Trumped at last year’s Davos when the mad clown accused Bank of America of being mean to Magats.3
So this year, Moynihan dutifully attended the speech of another fringy lunatic Cabinet member, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who read the mad clown’s True Sociopath post announcing he chicken-tacoed the European tariffs he had threatened the day before.
At the levels of wealth and power CEOs have, fear is a poor excuse. It’s weird how they don’t understand that proper governance will make their shareholders richer and happier. So weird that it’s almost insane.
Sorkin, Dealbook’s main writer, of course, is a corporate cheerleader, so it’s fair to say that interpretations matter. Even given that, though, Sorkin reported that attendees texted each other one word reactions to the announcement: “Taco!”
Yes, the world is as crazy as you think it is.
Business Insider’s Ben Bergman had a somewhat more jaded view of the Davos proceedings. “I was in the room for Trump’s Davos speech. The crowd was eerily silent — until he mentioned Greenland,” his headline proclaimed under a photograph where he looked like he knew he was stepping into a hostage situation:4
Poor guy. But check out that caption:
People queued for more than an hour to see Donald Trump speak.
Well, whose fault is that, you dummies? I guess it would get me fired, but if I worked for a publication like Business Insider and they asked me to cover a Trump speech, I’d demand the full cost of my subsequent therapy bills upfront. And I sure as hell ain’t standing in line for that shizpuzzle.
Bergman’s take about eagerness to see the grifter-in-chief was similar to Sorkin’s:
People here, including many CEOs and heads of state, waited in long lines to get in, eager to see Trump in person. It was the hottest ticket at the annual gathering of the world's business and political elites. Trump and his advisors built up the speech over the past few days, giving it an air of mystery.
Both reporters commented that the reaction to his speech was subdued at best, only gaining some applause when he promised not to do something terrible (it doesn’t matter much what that “terrible” thing is).
As Bergman tells it:
If Trump wanted a raucous applause for his laundry list of accomplishments that he sees as crowning achievements over his first year, he didn't get it.
In another part of the article, he writes:
When Trump criticized the fiery Tuesday address of Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, he delivered perhaps his boldest line: That Canada only exists because of US defense.
That’s not a bold line, Ben, it’s the puffery of a broken mind. Bergman continues:
“Oh wow,” someone behind me blurted out.
A minute later, a few people started heading for the exits.
Sorkin had the best quote. It came from Delaware Senator Chris Coons, who remarked on what a grim stage of madness we had reached when some European Davos attendees said to him, “It could’ve been worse.”5
Coons’ reaction:
“It’s remarkable when we’ve gotten to a place where we’re saying it could’ve been worse because an American president took off the table the use of force against a NATO ally.”
Herein lies the problem. Few people outside of a small Substack echosphere are treating this moment like the mental health emergency, and therefore, the national emergency, that it is.
You are treating it like the crisis it is, I suspect, or you wouldn’t be wasting your valuable time reading my various diatribes. But the rest of the nation is obviously still enthralled by the next outrage. Or perhaps they’re puzzling over why everything still costs so much. But few Americans outside our echo chambers or outside ICE invasion zones are bothering to step back and consider how serious the danger is.
It’s not just about protesters being shot in the face or kids being kidnapped and used as bait by ICE. That’s very bad, but it’s being led by someone else, Stephen Miller, with Trump, between his broken words, spluttering occasional acknowledgements that things might sometimes get “too rough.”
The United States still has a nuclear arsenal that can render Mother Earth into a roasted, radioactive pecan in less than seven minutes. That’s for starters. Drill down into the thousands of Substacks for more dangers (as if you don’t already know them).
If your conclusion is different than mine, that it’s not insanity that drives these billionaires and CEOs, but greed, I think my response would be, “What’s the difference between their level of greed and insanity?”
Especially when the fate of the Earth is involved.
Most Democratic congress critters are watching all this with their feet on the desk while issuing an occasional statement of outrage, instead of putting pressure on Bondi to release the Trump-Epstein files, which could bring this regime down.
Democratic congressional primaries begin in March.
Notes:
Meanwhile, back in Washington DC:
Well-known human-insect hybrid Jim Jordan is currently trying to play lawyer with Jack Smith as Smith provides details of Trump’s treason. You can view it on PBS via YouTube here.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
Nytimes.com. “DealBook: ‘Taco!’ the Day After,” 2026. NY Times Dealbook
There has got to be another word for “speech” in this case, but it eludes me right now.
Sorkin, Andrew Ross, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael, Lauren Hirsch, and Edmund Lee. “‘Debanking,’ and the Trump Diss Heard around Davos.” The New York Times, January 24, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/business/dealbook/debanking-davos-trump-bofa-moynihan.html.
Bergman, Ben. “I Was in the Room for Trump’s Davos Speech — Here’s What It Was Like.” Business Insider, January 21, 2026. https://www.businessinsider.com/i-attended-trump-speech-davos-audience-experience-2026-1
"There has got to be another word for “speech” in this case, but it eludes me right now."
May I suggest "bloviating drivel"?