Davos Daily: Mountain fashion, IPO excitement, and 5,000 soldiers

As the sun sets in Switzerland, we're now just 30 minutes from the start of the 2026 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. The conference starts at 6 p.m. local time with a concert from Grammy winner Jon Batiste, French violinist Renaud Capuçon, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

There's one panel this evening, too, titled "Which 2050 do we want?"

The real action begins tomorrow.

I live in sunny Los Angeles, so I spent a lot of time readying my Davos wardrobe of heavy coats, sweaters, and scarves. It wasn't needed, at least so far.

The temperature here hit 35 degrees on Monday, but it felt much warmer with the sun beaming down.

It is forecast to stay sunny all week with no snow in the forecast until the end of the week.

One attendee I met on the ski lift said the warm weather could be a good omen for the year ahead. Or, it could be a worrying sign of climate change, which has been deemphasized at this year's meeting.

Some companies are making use of the world's newest private jet, a luxurious Gulfstream that costs over $70 million.

Three Gulfstream G800 jets have landed near Davos today, flight-tracking data shows.

They are owned by Qualcomm, Visa, and Pfizer, according to data from JetSpy.

One of them touched down in Friedrichshafen, a German lakeside city just over the border with Switzerland and about 60 miles from Davos.

The other two landed in Basel, which is further away from the WEF host city. It hasn't had much business jet activity today, so it's not certain that those on board flew in for the annual meeting.

Nonetheless, it's pretty rare to see a G800. Gulfstream delivered the first one just four months ago.

This airplane can fly at up to Mach 0.935, or 613 mph at its cruising altitude. And it's big enough to have room for four living areas on board.

Passengers also shouldn't feel as fatigued as flying commercial, because the G800's cabin pressure makes it feel like the altitude is 2,480 feet. On the most modern airliners, the cabin altitude is more like 6,000 feet.

There was a long line to get past security on Monday at the USA House, the privately funded venue inside a historic church to showcase the United States at Davos.

Once inside the church, visitors were treated to a buffet featuring tomato soup, chicken salad sandwiches, and Greek salad.

There is a full programming schedule featuring luminaries such as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and venture capitalist David Sacks.

"I heard it was very hard to get into, so I'm glad I was able to get in," said Amanda Estiverne, who works as a consultant to fintech companies.

This year's Davos theme is "A Spirit of Dialogue," and several attendees I spoke to said they appreciated the US having a robust presence here. But they questioned why organizers chose to take over a church.

"I'm not sure what message they are trying to send, said Estiverne. "I don't know if there's a religious aspect."

"I'm always in favor of open and active diplomacy, but I'm not sure if a church is the right place," said Nils Handler, who works at the University of Zurich. "It feels strange."

As well as a place to talk shop, Davos is a place to be seen.

Nidhi Sinha, consulting firm BCG's head of marketing and communications for North America, wore a North Face coat and L.L. Bean boots on day one.

Nidhi decided this year not to lug her laptop around, so she bought herself a white, quilted, weatherproof Tory Burch bag that fits her notebook.

Getting employee buy-in on AI tools is top of mind for plenty of executives.

At KPMG, it only took one week for most of the company to hop on board one tool.

Tim Walsh, chair and CEO at KPMG US, told me 90% of staffers started using Google Gemini within the first week of it being offered a few months ago.

One benefit, Walsh said, was that Gemini wasn't employees' first experience with an AI tool. The company had previously rolled out OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot at an enterprise level roughly two years ago and had seen strong employee feedback.

But Walsh said another big factor in getting high uptake was issuing workers a separate phone they could use to access AI tools freely.

That reduced friction compared to before, as the phones were loaded with all the approved tools employees could use in an environment KPMG was comfortable with, Walsh said.

One person we're not likely to see at Davos is the world's richest man, Elon Musk.

Musk is an infrequent attendee at the event and had a public spat with organizers ahead of the 2023 edition, when he described it as "boring af."

Musk said at the time he'd turned down an invitation, but officials from the WEF said he hadn't been invited since 2015.

Though AI isn't the title theme of this year's conference, it's not like no one's talking about it. A quick glance at the speakers highlighted on the WEF's official website shows that AI is still very much top of mind.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei, Palantir's Alex Karp, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral, are all prominently displayed as attending.

Every year, the World Economic Forum picks a theme. Last year, it was "Collaboration for the Intelligent Age," and this year, it is "A Spirit of Dialogue."

While Davos 2025 focused heavily on the rise of AI, in 2026 organizers want attendees to use it as a forum to broaden their perspectives and hope the conference will serve as an "impartial platform for exchange of views and ideas."

At a time when President Donald Trump is at loggerheads with many other world leaders over Greenland, this year's theme seems particularly apt.

Most Davos attendees without the luxury of a private jet will arrive at Zurich Airport, and those touching down on Monday will be reminded as they come in to land that not everyone welcomes the event.

Alongside protests in the town itself, activists on Monday unfurled a giant banner close to Zurich airport featuring the faces of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, captioned: "Hey Davos billionaires: Shut up and pay your taxes.

A reminder: none of the trio is on the official list.

While the Davos guest list starts coming together months ahead of time, there's always room for a few last-minute wildcards.

Frequent Trump adversary and long-rumored potential Democratic presidential candidate, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced plans late last week to attend, setting up a clash between him and the president in the high mountains.

"Newsom's arrival at Davos confirms his desire to be seen as the Democratic Party leader and go-to guy for world leaders wanting an alternative to President Trump," Sally Susman, a longtime democratic fundraiser, told Business Insider over the weekend.

Newsom will use Davos as a platform to argue that Trump's economic agenda has been a failure that other leaders should not be part of, a spokesperson for Newsom, Izzy Gardon, said.

As if to underline just how strict security arrangements are, I've just had a message from Business Insider's Aki Ito, who is on the ground in Davos.

She described being made to empty her water bottle before going through an airport-style scanner to gain entry into a venue on the Promenade, Davos' main street, and the heart of the action this week.

As one might imagine at a gathering of some of the most important people in global tech, finance, and politics, security is extraordinarily tight.

Around 5,000 personnel from the Swiss armed forces will be deployed each day of the conference, according to local media.

On top of that, airspace near Davos is tightly controlled during WEF week, including the deployment of antiaircraft weapons near the town.

Flying commercial isn't always the best option for Davos attendees, and many are arriving by private jet.

Marc Benioff's Gulfstream G700 is one of the latest jets to touch down near the alpine resort.

The Salesforce CEO's plane flew over 14 hours from Hawaii to Friedrichshafen, Germany, according to data from JetSpy. It touched down shortly after 11 a.m. local time on Monday

It's perhaps the swankiest jet to arrive so far. The price tag for a G700 starts at $78 million.

Benioff is scheduled to speak tomorrow.

Two BlackRock-owned Gulfstream G650 jets have landed in Zurich, too, per JetSpy's tracking data.

One of them arrived on Sunday morning, followed by the other about 25 hours later. They both came from New York's Westchester County Airport.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is also the interim co-chair of the WEF. He's due to speak tomorrow morning.

Corporate jets owned by Google, IBM, The Carlyle Group, and Eli Lilly have also landed in the region since Saturday, per JetSpy.

Airspace restrictions mean very few will land at the airport closest to Davos. Instead, most are arriving in Zurich, and some at Friedrichshafen. The German town is about 60 miles from Davos as the crow flies.

Just because it's cold doesn't mean you can't look good.

Kayla Peterson, director of partnerships at AI Wellness, traveled to her first Davos from Los Angeles and was dressed to impress on Monday morning.

"I feel like when you look the part, doors will open," she said, explaining why she was "stepping it up a notch."

Not much in Davos is cheap, including checking your coat. Business Insider editor in chief Jamie Heller spied the price of coat check at the five-star Grandhotel Belvédère, one of Davos' hot meeting spots during WEF week, thanks to its proximity to the main convention center.

At $5 an item, it is one of the costlier cloakrooms we've seen, but don't worry, you can pay with your Amex.

At any gathering of the so-called global elite, protests are pretty much inevitable, and Davos is no different.

Demonstrators gathered in the town on Sunday to oppose the event, and call for higher taxation on billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the world's richest man, Elon Musk. While none of the trio are on the official guest list this year, Davos has long been a touchstone for protests against the superrich.

Some locals aren't fans of the disruption the WEF causes, either. Business Insider's Dan DeFrancesco spied several banners on a house close to the conference's main USA House.

One reads "The WEF is eating up our living space," while the others, well, you don't need to be fluent in Swiss German to understand them.

Will the IPO window finally open up in 2026? There's a lot of talk about some massive companies — SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic — making their public market debut this year.

Chris Taylor, NYSE's chief development officer, told me it could be a "banner year for IPOs."

Those AI and tech giants are unique in their size and name-brand recognition in a way most other private companies can't relate to. But their decision to go public could serve as a stamp of approval for smaller companies to dive in as well.

"Having a mindset change is really important," Taylor told me, and those larger companies will give the public markets a stamp of approval, he added.

So which ones will IPO this year? Taylor declined to speculate on that — I asked — but he did say he could see a domino effect among the big players once one makes the leap.

By far the most anticipated event of this year's World Economic Forum is a "special address" from President Donald Trump at 2 p.m. local time on Wednesday.

While there's no official confirmation of what Trump plans to talk about, it's likely that the ongoing saga of his desire to make Greenland part of the US will feature heavily.

Over the weekend, Trump said that from February 1, he would impose an additional 10% tariff on Denmark, which controls Greenland, as well as Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland, unless they agree to a deal to hand over Greenland to the United States.

European leaders have been unequivocal in their opposition to Trump's plan, with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday morning giving a nationwide address to condemn the new tariffs and defend Denmark's sovereignty over Greenland.

While Greenland seems most likely, Trump's speech may focus on something completely different, with rumors swirling in the rarified air of the Swiss Alps that he could make a major announcement during the speech.

"All we are hearing is that it's going to be BIG BIG BIG and to clear our schedules," veteran journalist Steve Clemons wrote in his "Washington Note" newsletter late on Sunday.

Davos kicks off in earnest this evening at around 6 p.m. local time (midday ET), with a curtain-raising concert from Grammy winner Jon Batiste, French violinist Renaud Capuçon, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Then on Tuesday, the real action starts.

Big names from across the worlds of business, tech, and politics have been arriving in the Swiss ski town over the weekend, with more pouring in on Monday.

Figures like Bill Gates, Microsoft boss Satya Nadella, and Jensen Huang, the CEO of AI darling Nvidia, head the bill on the business side.

Political bigwigs attending include French President Emmanuel Macron, Argentina's Javier Milei, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and, of course, President Donald Trump.

Davos might turn into the center of the business world for a week, but it's still a ski town at its core.

I got to check out the slopes on Sunday. And after a 10-year hiatus from snowboarding, I came out mostly unscathed. (To be honest, that's the real victory.)

Still, there was some business to be done as Cloudflare was holding an event. The tech company actually has a relationship with the US Ski & Snowboard.

It's not just your typical corporate sponsorship, though. Some US Ski Team athletes who attended the event discussed the importance of teaming up with tech companies. The innovation they provide can help them during training, like understanding how to better hit a certain line on the mountain to shave fractions of a second off their runs.

For a conference full of so many powerful people, it sure ain't easy to get to.

Davos doesn't have an airport, which means some extra commuting (even for billionaires).

The nearest airport for private planes is St. Moritz, but that's still nearly a two-hour drive. (Although there are always helicopters.) For the rest of us, Zurich Airport is a little over two hours by car or three hours by train.

Here's how I managed the trip this year: