World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab Stepping Down by 2025

(Bloomberg) — Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, is stepping down from active leadership of the body that convenes the annual meetings of global executives and politicians in Davos, Switzerland. 

Schwab, 86, announced his decision on Tuesday and is transitioning to a non-executive role by January 2025, according to a statement on the WEF website. 

“The organization has also been undergoing a planned governance evolution from a founder-managed organization to one where a president and managing board assume full executive responsibility,” the WEF said. 

The body didn’t specify who would take those roles. Semafor reported the decision earlier. 

Schwab started what became the World Economic Forum in 1971 — initially called the European Management Forum — as a symposium on corporate management. 

In the following decades the event ballooned to become an annual gathering of some 2,500 corporate executives, financiers, and politicians and other public figures from more than 100 countries addressing matters such as inequality, migration, digital innovation and globalization.

Schwab chose the Alpine location of Davos in a bid to make guests feel relaxed and speak freely, according to the Geneva-based nonprofit’s website. With a slogan of “committed to improving the state of the world,” the forum attracts global attention and criticism, as well as a helping of conspiracy theories. 

Schwab, born in Germany, to parents of Swiss origin. While the organization he founded has frequently faced the charge of elitism, Schwab has consistently stressed the need for the kind of global cooperation it offered. 

“Big challenges — environmental, poverty — cannot be solved by governments alone, or by business alone, or by civil society,” Schwab told the Financial Times in defense of the conference in 2020. “You need cooperation.”

(Updates with WEF statement)

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