American Faceplant: Panic of Elites at Davos

The billionaire class held a riot in Switzerland. This bargain no longer works.

In Davos, never a haven for those in touch with the common man, the American billionaire class came to panic this week—and to show the world just how empty, cowardly, and dangerous they all are. The last two days in Switzerland were a riot of geopolitical own-goals, klepto-fascist theater, and tech bro fraud scaling into the trillions of dollars.

After Trump’s bizarre performance in the White House Monday, he gave a speech to most of the political and financial leaders of Europe that was worse—because it had long-range, devastating implications for the United States.

Pirates, NATO & TACO

As one example of how unhinged it was, while repeating a laundry list of economic achievements that never happened, Trump went on a racist tirade which wove together 1920s-era eugenicist racism about Somalis, murdering people on “drug boats,” insuring oil tankers—and pirates.

This is not a man capable of controlling his own thoughts, emotions, or behavior, much less a global superpower. This is a man who has completely escaped into his own grandiose delusions.

“…we’re cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits. Can you believe that Somalian, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought. We say these are low IQ people. How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money? We have, you know, they’re pirates, they’re good pirates, but we shoot them out of the water just like we shoot the drug boats out. They’re not pirating too many boats lately, do you notice? When they go out into those boats, they want to take over a billion and a half dollar tanker, load it up with oil, and they say, “We’re going to blow up your boat, they have powerful weapons.” You hit the side of the boat, you blow the whole thing up. The insurance companies are petrified, so they say, “Just give them the boat, we’ll give them money instead.” And I don’t do that. We blow them right to hell out of the water. We see them going out, we blow them out of the water. We don’t have any pirates so much anymore.”

In another part of his speech, Trump returned to his obsessive campaign to steal Greenland from Denmark—and repeatedly insulted NATO, the most successful alliance in human history, as “useless” and dependent on American generosity.

Just after Trump’s speech, NATO chief Mark Rutte—who has been playing the role of Trump Whisperer for the EU since the election—apparently told Trump that if the U.S. put tariffs on Europe over Greenland, the EU’s retaliation would cause an American financial winter.

Trump’s backtrack was immediate, and his choice to retreat on financial network CNBC was a sign of his fear. Trump’s insecurity over losing money, losing status, and losing the faith of his billionaire backers through a stock market crash is greater than his need to add “a slab of ice” to the map of America. Needless to say, this weakness has been noticed by our adversaries.

Trump TACOs on CNBC, Truth Social

“New Gaza”

But after his TACO on Greenland, Trump wasn’t finished trying to destroy the world order at Davos. The “Board of Peace”—an international non-entity conjured up by Trump without jurisdiction or the right to do anything on behalf of the United States—had its inaugural meeting of wannabe dictators, despots, and fascists. Each member was required to give a billion dollars to join—despite being given no power or any perceivable goals beyond filling Trump’s ego and bank account.

Putin was invited to join, but hasn’t decided yet because he wants to use assets frozen during his war on Ukraine as his entry fee.

Countries on Board of Peace; Davos 1/21/26

Perhaps the most gut-wrenching part of the entire Davos charade was Jared Kushner blithely droning on about “New Gaza” over what looked like screenshots from a SimCity video game. Kushner’s line of bullshit was deep and dense, including gems like:

“we don’t have a Plan B… we’re gonna make it happen. In the Middle East, cities of 2-3 million people, they build this in three years.”

Sure, Jared.

Of course, not a word was said about this project being built over the graves of tens of thousands of slaughtered innocent men, women and children, or the blood and tears of millions being displaced from their homes by Bibi Netanyahu and the IDF.

What the “Board of Peace” is doing to Gaza is a war crime on top of a genocide.

But Davos is, above all, a conference about money—big money—and how the elites of the world believe it should be spread around to the rest of us.

Hype, Doublespeak, and Outright Horseshit

For most of the Davos audience, the disgraceful performance by Donald Trump and his regime was a sideshow to a star-studded lineup of American investors and technology oligarchs who were there for one reason: to convince people that the trillions being spent on AI infrastructure is a great opportunity for the world, instead of a catastrophic unforced error that will cause a global financial crisis.

The Big Con: Science Fiction as National Mythology

The layers of hype, doublespeak, and outright horseshit about chatbots, LLMs, and robots were piled higher and deeper with every billionaire who tried to justify what they were doing. The aggregate level of ignorance about AI technology by the elite class, and their subsequent inability to articulate any coherent rationale for the trillions being invested, never fails to shock me.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, Davos 1/21/26

Perhaps the only real attempt to explain the hype around AI at Davos was by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella—who is investing hundreds of billions into chatbots and data centers. But in trying to explain this spending, he simply pointed out that he has no real idea why he’s doing it, and why it is, in fact, a bubble.

“For this not to be a bubble by definition it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.

I mean I think a telltale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we’re talking about are the tech firms right if all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side that then that’s by it’s just purely supply side right…

That’s what we’re seeing you know in the developed world in particular but… the demand all over the world will only be there if there is local surplus all over the world. And so that’s sort of the way I see the equation.”

This is avoidance behavior: the fear of admitting you were wrong in your convictions. Nadella is a man running a $3.3T company, making the most basic error in business, putting supply ahead of demand. It’s just telling yourself: “If you build it, they will come.” It’s faith, not software—or science.

Who wouldn’t want a robot to…

Finally, Elon Musk, the richest and most racist man on Earth, let Trump do the dirty work of destroying democracy for the week, to free himself to hype his latest fraud—humanoid robots.

Nearly the entire valuation of Tesla, a $1.5 trillion stock, is based on this categorically ridiculous nonsense that could only have been said by someone who has no idea how humans, or robots, work.

ELON MUSK: And actually, my prediction is in the benign scenario of the future that we will -- the robot -- we will actually make so many robots in AI that they will actually saturate all human needs. Meaning you wouldn’t be able to even think of something to ask the robot for at a certain point. Like, there will be such an abundance of goods and services. My prediction is there will be more robots than people.

LARRY FINK, Blackrock: But how do you then have human purpose in that scenario?

MUSK: Yeah. I mean, you know, nothing’s perfect, you know. But I mean, it is a necessary -- like you can’t have both. You can’t have work that has to be done and amazing abundance for all. Because if it is work that has to be done, then you -- and only some people can do it, then you can’t have abundance of people.

FINK: It is narrow.

MUSK: …who wouldn’t want a robot to, you know, assuming it is very safe, watch over your kids. Take care of your pet. If you have elderly parents, a lot of friends might have said that, elderly parents, it is very difficult to take care of them.

Who wouldn’t want a robot to watch their pets, or parents, or kids?

Uhhhh.

I haven’t done a scientific poll, but I feel pretty confident that actually almost no one wants this—except mentally ill people who don’t care about other human beings at all. People with no empathy. People with psychopathic personalities who feel that taking care of their own families is a burden.

Moreover, what Musk describes—production of at least 8 billion robots—is literally impossible within any of our lifetimes, even if the technology existed, which it does not. It is pure fiction, as is his asinine concept of “abundance.”

It’s all a techno-futurist mirage to conceal his insatiable quest to remove the pesky humans from every equation—an incandescent self-hate turned inside out and amplified by almost a trillion dollars.

American Faceplant

When a plurality of the electorate was conned into voting for Donald Trump a second time, the world was given the message that he was not an aberration in the American system but represents the underlying reality of its government—and its people.

This was said best by Canadian PM Mark Carney, who laid it bare in his speech at Davos—this is “a rupture, not a transition.”

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

While Carney was speaking about the effects of America’s behavior on the world stage, his criticism of the core hypocrisy at the heart of the international system perhaps even more aptly describes our national breakdown. He was not just diagnosing how a malignant American government subordinates other countries; he was diagnosing how America subordinates its own people.

The American system of checks and balances, norms and institutions, Democrats and Republicans, “left” and “right,” was always a “useful fiction.” It was useful to the people in power, to the elites who have slowly dragged us into a ditch over decades. It was useful to the people who want to spend trillions on corrosive, worthless technology—while they remain silent about the government murdering protesters, and kidnapping people out of their homes.

Just as Mark Carney has declared that Canada will no longer go along with this fiction, so too can the American people. The system as we knew it has been hijacked, distorted, and weaponized.

This bargain no longer works.

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