CEO of BlackRock Larry Fink kicked off the World Economic Forum on Tuesday with a stark message, acknowledging a significant erosion of trust in global institutions and elites.
Speaking at the 56th Annual Meeting of the WEF in Davos, which gathered around 65 heads of state and government and nearly 850 of the world's top CEOs and chairpersons, he acknowledged that the gathering has lost trust and “feels out of step with the moment.”
“But now for the harder question: Will anyone outside this room care? Because if we’re being honest, for many people this meeting feels out of step with the moment: elites in an age of populism, an established institution in an era of deep institutional distrust,” he admitted.
Fink, who was appointed interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum in August 2025, said it is also obvious that the world now places far less trust in the forum to help shape what comes next.
“If WEF is going to be useful going forward, it has to regain that trust,” he said.
The billionaire boss of the world’s largest asset manager said that prosperity is not just growth in the aggregate. “It can’t be measured by GDP or the market caps of the world’s largest companies alone. It has to be judged by how many people can see it, touch it, and build a future on it.”
Fink said that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain.
He noted that now AI threatens to replay the same pattern.
Fink said early gains are flowing to the owners of models, data, and infrastructure, questioning what AI does to white-collar work what globalization did to blue-collar.
He urged those gathered at Davos to create a “credible plan” for broad participation in the gains AI can deliver.
“Not with abstractions about the jobs of tomorrow, but with a credible plan for broad participation in the gains.”
In another dimension of change, Fink said the forum shouldn’t want panels where everyone agrees 95% of the time.
“The objective isn’t agreement. It’s understanding. It’s sitting with people we disagree with, taking their arguments seriously, and being willing to admit that they might see something we don’t,” he said.
Fink also noted that the central tension of the forum is that many of the people most affected by what participants talk about will never come to the conference. “Davos is an elite gathering trying to shape a world that belongs to everyone.”
He added, “That’s why this year’s theme is the Spirit of Dialogue. Because dialogue is the only way a room like this earns the legitimacy to shape ideas for people who aren’t in it.”
Fink called for WEF to start doing something new: showing up and listening in the places where the modern world is actually built. “Davos, yes. But also places like Detroit and Dublin and cities like Jakarta and Buenos Aires. The mountain will come down to earth.”
