The World Economic Forum doesn’t hide what it is. It publishes, announces, sends out press releases about it, and posts the videos on its own website.
What it counts on is that most people are too busy working and too distracted, doomscrolling from mental exhaustion, to ever read the press releases. There’s an entire body of research on those thirty-second TikTok videos and what happens to your brain during that dopamine loop.
I read the press releases and I hope more people will do the same. We ought to pay attention to the agencies shaping the world we live in and our children will inherit.
Before we go further, let me say something directly to the skeptic in the room, because I know you’re there and I respect you for it. The entirety of The Paper Trail is written through the lens of a skeptic. I set my own intuition and conclusions aside. I demand proof. I gather evidence. I hold myself to the same standard I hold every institution or person I write about.
A list this long, connecting this many names to a single organization, can sound like exactly the kind of thing your most conspiracy-minded cousin forwards at Thanksgiving. So let me be clear: not everyone on this list shares an ideology. Not everyone trained by this program emerged from it as an agent of anything. What the documentation lists isn’t a unified conspiracy, but a unified pipeline. One organization with a private selection process for a multi-year training program feeding people into the positions that shape your daily life before you ever had a chance to vote for or against them.
No theory, it’s just what Klaus Schwab said out loud in his own words.
I’m not writing this to tell you the World Economic Forum, or anyone connected to it, is evil. I’m showing you what’s documented: the reach of one unelected organization, and a string of names and events tied to it that have already raised more than an eyebrow on their own, without my help. What that adds up to is yours to decide.
The World Economic Forum was founded in 1971 by a German professor named Klaus Schwab as a non-profit foundation under Swiss law, headquartered in Cologny, just outside Geneva, and supervised by the Swiss federal government. It hosts an annual meeting in Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, where heads of state, central bankers, CEOs of the world’s largest corporations, media figures, celebrities, and representatives of international organizations gather each January to discuss the state of the world.
No one elected them to do this.
The World Economic Forum is a private organization, because it’s an NGO. Quite clever, eh? Its members aren’t chosen by voters. Its agenda isn’t approved by any legislature, nor do its recommendations carry any legal authority. And yet the people who implement policy in the governments, banks, media organizations, and international institutions that shape your daily life attend its meetings, participate in its programs, and in many cases were trained by it before they ever held public office.
But the World Economic Forum didn’t emerge out of thin air, and its roots tell you something important about what it was always meant to be.
In the 1960s, Schwab studied at Harvard under Professor Henry Kissinger, with whom he formed what has been described as a lifelong friendship. Kissinger at that time was directing the Harvard International Seminar, a program it was later revealed had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to the tune of $135,000. The CIA funding was exposed the year Schwab left Harvard. Kissinger recruited Schwab and introduced him to John Kenneth Galbraith and Herman Kahn, both connected to the Council on Foreign Relations. The founding panel that shaped what would become the WEF included Melvin Conant of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and a representative of a research center funded by Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie money.
Kissinger first spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 1980, declaring the world had entered an age of global interdependence. He appeared at Davos as recently as 2022, in conversation with Schwab, discussing the war in Ukraine and the reshaping of the global order. His profile remains on the WEF’s own website to this day.
The Rockefeller Foundation is currently listed as a formal WEF partner, described on the WEF’s site as working across health, food, power, and economic mobility.
So: a CIA-funded Harvard program produced the founder. Rockefeller money was present at the creation. Kissinger spoke at Davos from 1980 until his death. And the Rockefeller Foundation is a current documented partner.
The organization Klaus Schwab built didn’t emerge from European idealism, but from the American national security and financial establishment of the Cold War era, carrying those roots into the twenty-first century while presenting itself to the world as a neutral Swiss philanthropy.
Schwab understood exactly what he was building. In a 2017 interview, he said the Forum takes pride in how its Young Global Leaders program lets it, in his own words, “penetrate the global cabinets of countries.” Penetrate. His word, on record, and published.
He said it more than once, and more than one way. At a public reception for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Schwab told the room that more than half of Trudeau’s cabinet were, in his words, “actually Young Global Leaders.”
More than half of a sitting prime minister’s cabinet. Trained by a private Swiss foundation before they ever held public office. Named by its own founder, on the record.
The Young Global Leaders program, formerly called Global Leaders for Tomorrow when it was founded in 1992, isn’t a public conference. It’s a private, multi-year instructional seminar. Candidates are screened without their knowledge before being invited to apply. They’re nominated by existing alumni, serve six-year terms, and are subject to veto during the selection process.
Over 1,400 people have completed the program. They come from more than 120 countries. And the list of their names is the most important document in this installment.
Read it slowly.
Heads of government and senior officials trained by the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders program:
Vladimir Putin. Emmanuel Macron. Justin Trudeau. Angela Merkel. Jacinda Ardern. Sanna Marin. Tony Blair. Boris Johnson. Alexander De Croo, Prime Minister of Belgium. Mamuka Bakhtadze, former Prime Minister of Georgia. Carlos Alvarado Quesada, President of Costa Rica. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is listed as an unspecified WEF member.
Media figures trained by the program:
George Stephanopoulos. Anderson Cooper (son of Gloria Vanderbilt). Van Jones. Sanjay Gupta. Leana Wen. Maria Bartiromo. Bret Stephens. Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Pause on Leana Wen for one moment. She was recruited to the Young Global Leaders program because of her role as a professor of health policy. Years later, when CNN needed a COVID expert to appear on camera and tell the American public what to think about a pandemic, it chose Leana Wen out of every health policy academic in the country.
She’d already been trained.
Business and finance figures connected to the WEF:
Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, sits on the WEF board. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, is a WEF Agenda Contributor. Jeff Bezos is a WEF Agenda Contributor. George Soros is a WEF Agenda Contributor. He’s delivered speeches from the Davos stage itself. The Open Society Foundations doesn’t write checks to the World Economic Forum. It doesn’t need to. The two organizations fund many of the same groups across more than a hundred countries, pointed in the same direction, each without a single vote ever being cast. If you read the previous installment of The Paper Trail, you already know who George Soros is. What this piece shows you is that he wasn’t operating alone. He was operating in the same room.
Bill Gates was selected as a Young Global Leader in 1993, decades before Event 201, decades before the Gates Foundation became the largest co-sponsor of pandemic preparedness exercises on earth. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Peter Thiel. Sam Altman, the architect of OpenAI. The men who built the platforms that decide what you see, what you buy, and increasingly, what you’re permitted to say, were trained inside the same program before any of those platforms existed at scale.
American politicians across the political spectrum:
Pete Buttigieg. Gavin Newsom. Nikki Haley. Dan Crenshaw. Adam Kinzinger. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide for over two decades. This isn’t a partisan list. The program doesn’t appear to care which party trains the next generation of American leadership, only that it does.
Celebrities and cultural figures:
Leonardo DiCaprio, recruited to the Young Global Leaders program in 2008, addressed the United Nations on climate change in 2014. Bono, Young Global Leaders program, 1993. Ashton Kutcher. Charlize Theron. Wyclef Jean. Priyanka Chopra. Chris Tucker. Roger Federer. Megan Rapinoe. Tony Hawk. Yo-Yo Ma, who also sits on the WEF board.
These aren’t people who attended a conference. They were trained. In a private, multi-year program, nominated by people who’d already been through the same program. Klaus Schwab called it penetration into all important areas of the world. It appears the goal was well met, even exceeded.
The WEF has a strong theme around globalization. Davos meetings and initiatives routinely focus on sustaining and evolving globalization, and the WEF even posted on its own website, this sentence before eventually deleting it: “You will own nothing. And you will be happy.”
Deleted things have screenshots. The internet remembers.
In 2020, Klaus Schwab published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. In it he described what the post-pandemic world should look like: a restructured global economy, redesigned social contracts, transformed institutions of government. He wrote that the pandemic represented, in his own words, “a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”
The same year that people were following arrows on grocery store floors. The same year that two empty hospital ships sat in American harbors while nursing home directors were ordered to admit COVID-positive patients. The same year that the Event 201 recommendation to suppress counter messages was being implemented across every major social media platform.
Klaus Schwab saw that year as a rare window of opportunity.
Now we arrive at the thread that connects the World Economic Forum to the first installment in The Paper Trail series.
Jeffrey Epstein called himself the Davos concierge. That’s his own word for himself, documented in emails released by the United States Department of Justice. For years, before and after his 2008 conviction on charges including procuring a child for prostitution, Epstein used the lure of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting to broker meetings between his contacts and the billionaires and government officials who gathered there. He promised access. He delivered introductions. He operated in the margins of the most powerful private gathering on earth.
DOJ documents and emails from Epstein’s Yahoo account show him arranging meetings at Davos between senior European politicians and financial executives. In January 2008, while under investigation for crimes against children, he connected an Emirati billionaire to the European competition commissioner. In 2010 he arranged meetings between the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior JP Morgan executive.
In 2013 he wrote to Larry Summers, former US Secretary of the Treasury, suggesting they coordinate a meeting at Davos.
Borge Brende, President and Chief Executive Officer of the World Economic Forum since 2017 and former Norwegian foreign minister, had attended at least three business dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan home. He’d exchanged emails and text messages with him. After one dinner, he emailed Epstein to say the conversation had given him plenty to think about, and closed by calling him, in his words, “a brilliant host.”
Epstein replied that both he and a guest were, in his words, “very impressed with you.”
In another exchange Brende wrote just four words: “Missing you Sir. —Borge.”
On February 26, 2026, following an independent investigation and the release of those documents, Borge Brende resigned as President and CEO of the World Economic Forum.
Klaus Schwab had already resigned the year before, in April 2025, after anonymous whistleblowers alleged misconduct including mistreating employees and misusing organizational funds. The WEF board’s own investigation, concluded that August, found no evidence of material wrongdoing by Schwab. It did note minor irregularities stemming from blurred lines between personal contributions and Forum operations.
The founder of the organization that penetrates global cabinets resigned amid a whistleblower investigation that ultimately cleared him. His successor resigned after DOJ documents showed him corresponding warmly with a convicted child sex offender.
The organization continues.
Trained Young Global Leaders continue to hold the positions they were placed in before most voters knew the program existed. None of them were chosen by the people they now govern, inform, or sell to. They were chosen by an organization in Geneva.
I read the press releases.
I followed the thread.
It started with a hotel in Manhattan on a Friday morning in October 2019, where fifteen people gathered to design the communications architecture for a pandemic that began thirty days later. It ran through the nursing homes of New York, where people died alone while governors signed directives and then falsified the counts. It ran through a cow pasture in Georgia where someone carved instructions for the post-apocalyptic management of the human race into granite and hid their name. It ran through twenty-five centuries of censorship, from the censor of Rome to the checkbook of George Soros, a man who fancied himself a god and spent thirty-two billion dollars on the proof.
And it runs here.
To a private organization born from a CIA-funded Harvard program, carrying Rockefeller and Kissinger DNA from its first days, registered under Swiss law, meeting annually in a ski resort, training the people who run the governments and the banks and the newsrooms and the health agencies of one hundred and twenty countries, in a program most voters have never heard of, selected without the candidates’ knowledge, nominated by people who were already in the program, serving six-year terms with no public oversight and no democratic accountability of any kind.
The CEO wrote missing you sir to a convicted child sex offender and resigned when the documents came out.
And somewhere in the margin of all of it, a man who called himself the Davos concierge was brokering access to the world’s most powerful people from the margins of the most powerful private gathering on earth, before and after his conviction for procuring a child for prostitution, until the day he died by suicide in a federal jail cell while facing sex trafficking charges.
The pattern isn’t hidden. It never was.
It’s published on their websites and in their press releases. It’s in the DOJ documents. It is in Schwab’s own book. It’s in the resignation letters of the men who ran the organization until the files came out.
I didn’t need aa gift or any special insight to find any of this. I only needed to read what they’d already published.
And so, now, have you.
The paper trail continues.
Sources
1. World Economic Forum. About page and founding history. weforum.org
2. Klaus Schwab interview, 2017. Quote: “penetrate the global cabinets of countries.”
3. Klaus Schwab. Public remarks at reception for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Quote: “actually Young Global Leaders.” Documented via Door to Freedom and multiple secondary sources citing WEF/Trudeau footage.
4. Young Global Leaders, Wikipedia. Program founded 1992 as Global Leaders for Tomorrow. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Global_Leaders
5. World Economic Forum. From Entrepreneurs to Scientists: Meet the 2022 Class of Young Global Leaders. Press release, April 20, 2022. weforum.org
6. World Economic Forum. Meet the Young Global Leaders Class of 2025. Press release, April 15, 2025. weforum.org
7. Human Events. Who Are the World Economic Forum’s ‘Young Global Leaders?’ The Names May Surprise You. November 10, 2022. humanevents.com
8. Swiss Policy Research. The WEF Young Global Leaders. Comprehensive alumni documentation. swprs.org/wef-young-global-leaders
9. Door to Freedom. The Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. doortofreedom.org
10. Wikispooks. WEF/Young Global Leaders documentation, including Schwab penetration quote with citation.
11. World Economic Forum. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” original WEF publication, subsequently deleted. Archived via Wayback Machine.
12. Schwab, Klaus and Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset. Forum Publishing, 2020.
13. Henry A. Kissinger. World Economic Forum profile page. weforum.org/people/henry-a-kissinger
14. World Economic Forum. Kissinger: The challenges facing the world right now. Davos 2022 session. weforum.org/stories/2022/05/kissinger-these-are-the-main-geopolitical-challenges-facing-the-world-right-now
15. Shukla, Ashish. The man who runs the World Economic Forum you know nothing about. Medium. Documentation of Kissinger-Schwab Harvard relationship and CIA-funded seminar. ashishshukla-92505.medium.com
16. Truth In News. Henry Kissinger Was The REAL WEF Creator. Documentation of founding panel including Rockefeller Standard Oil and Rockefeller/Ford/Carnegie-funded research center. thinkaboutit.online
17. Dartmouth News. Kissinger Enjoyed Close Ties With Nelson Rockefeller. November 2023. home.dartmouth.edu
18. Rockefeller Foundation. World Economic Forum partner page. weforum.org/organizations/the-rockefeller-foundation
19. Oxford Academic / Socio-Economic Review. Rise and fall of private advocacy forums. Documentation of Rockefeller connections to WEF founding era. academic.oup.com/ser
20. George Soros. World Economic Forum Agenda Contributor profile. weforum.org/stories/authors/georgesoros
21. Foreign Policy. Philanthropist George Soros delivers speech on sidelines of World Economic Forum in Davos, January 24, 2019. foreignpolicy.com
22. Bloomberg. Jeffrey Epstein Davos Emails Reveal His Use of WEF to Broker Elite Meetings. February 17, 2026. bloomberg.com
23. SWI swissinfo.ch. Davos ‘Concierge’ Jeffrey Epstein Used WEF to Broker Elite Meetings. February 17, 2026. swissinfo.ch
24. The Hill. WEF CEO Brende Epstein emails dinners probe. February 6, 2026. thehill.com
25. Al Jazeera. World Economic Forum head Borge Brende quits after Epstein links revealed. February 26, 2026. aljazeera.com
26. Fox News. World Economic Forum faces fresh scrutiny as Epstein ties revive past scandals, criticism. March 14, 2026. foxnews.com
27. US Department of Justice. Epstein files document release, 2026. Source of Brende-Epstein correspondence and Davos networking emails.
28. Berndpulch.org. The Davos Connection: WEF Elite and the Epstein Index. Epstein Index Project, forensic data initiative. February 27, 2026.
29. Federal Bureau of Prisons / Office of Inspector General. Official finding: Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide while in federal custody, August 10, 2019, while facing federal sex trafficking charges.
30. World Economic Forum. News release: Board of Trustees concludes investigation into whistleblower allegations against Klaus Schwab, finds no evidence of material wrongdoing. August 15, 2025. weforum.org/press/2025/08/news-release
31. CNN Business. WEF CEO Børge Brende steps down as the Epstein files claim another top executive. Confirms Schwab stepped down as chair in April 2025, cleared by August 2025 investigation. February 26, 2026. cnn.com