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January 16, 2026

Good morning. Andrew here. I’m headed to Davos, Switzerland, this weekend for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. We’ll be bringing you all the news on the ground next week with my colleagues at The Times.

It’s going to be a decidedly different Davos this year, in part because Larry Fink has become the interim co-chair of the forum — and its de facto mayor, in place of the event’s founder, Klaus Schwab. Fink has used his influence to help attract a cast of high-profile names, including President Trump, and will be onstage multiple times throughout the week, interviewing and being interviewed. (Fink happens to be on a panel I’m moderating.)

Our coverage from Davos begins on Tuesday. We’ll be off on Monday, with the markets closed for Martin Luther King’s Birthday. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

Larry Fink, C.E.O. of BlackRock, has become a force in reshaping the agenda and participant list for the World Economic Forum. Karsten Moran for The New York Times

BlackRock’s clout

For decades, the hierarchy of the World Economic Forum was clear: There were the heads of state, the billionaires, the hangers-on and, above them all, Klaus Schwab. He was “the Professor,” the founder, the man who could summon kings and captains of industry with a letter.

But when the private jets descend into Switzerland next week, the man who put Davos on the map will be conspicuously absent following an internal investigation into W.E.F.’s workplace culture. (The forum’s board later cleared Schwab of wrongdoing.) After his resignation from W.E.F. last April — and the board’s appointment of new leadership in August — this is no longer his party.

Welcome to Larry Fink’s Davos.

Fink, the chairman and C.E.O. of BlackRock, has officially taken the reins as interim co-chair of the forum’s board of trustees, alongside Roche’s André Hoffmann.

The entire W.E.F. board hit the phones to help elevate this year’s event, given the importance of the first confab in the post-Schwab era. But make no mistake: In the eyes of the Wall Street and Washington power brokers heading to Davos this year, Fink has become a quiet force reshaping the forum.

The clearest evidence of this new era is the guest list. For months, the big question was whether President Trump would attend. He is coming. And by many accounts, it was Fink who helped close the deal. The relevance of Davos has been questioned in recent years. But Trump’s presence guarantees that the world’s attention will be focused on the event.

Fink’s contacts has been equally effective in tapping into Silicon Valley. One of the most notable figures set to attend this year is Jensen Huang, the C.E.O. of Nvidia. Huang has never before attended Davos. But the founder of the A.I. chip maker is arguably the most important C.E.O. in the world right now. And Fink plans to conduct the keynote interview with Huang himself. Fink also persuaded Ken Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund giant Citadel, to return to Davos after a 15-year absence.

One other big change: While many corporate leaders previously competed to not spend time at the event’s open panels, favoring private meetings, Fink & Co. pushed a number of them to appear on public stages. Jamie Dimon, who had long eschewed official Davos stage interviews, will appear for the first time in years. And Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O., will be in conversation with, well, Fink.

The W.E.F. itself flexed about this year’s robust guest list, touting that “a record 400 top political leaders, including close to 65 heads of state and government — with six G7 leaders expected — nearly 850 of the world’s top C.E.O.s and chairs, and almost 100 leading unicorns and technology pioneers will convene in Davos-Klosters for one of the highest-level gatherings in the Annual Meeting’s history.”

Much of Fink’s influence comes from BlackRock’s size. The firm now manages $14 trillion in assets. BlackRock’s status as a big shareholder of most major public companies means that when Fink calls, C.E.O.s are likely to pick up the phone.

Fink had been one of Wall Street’s most vocal supporters in pushing companies to embrace stakeholder capitalism and climate protections — issues that were core Davos themes, but which have lost favor in the business community amid a wider conservative backlash.

It’s unclear how many years the “Fink-ification” of Davos will last. His role is considered interim, and the widely held expectation is that the board would like to hire Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, to run the W.E.F. when her term expires near the end of 2027.

The U.S. strikes a trade deal with Taiwan, with huge investment pledges. In exchange for Washington lowering a tariff rate to 15 percent from 20 percent, Taiwanese companies have committed to invest $250 billion in semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. (And Taipei will provide another $250 billion in credit guarantees to smaller companies to expand there.) But some Taiwanese people are worried it may hollow out the island’s key industry.

Paramount’s lawsuit against Warner Bros. Discovery won’t be sped up. A Delaware judge said that Paramount, which wants to force the Warner Bros. Discovery board to disclose more information about the media company’s planned sale to Netflix, hadn’t proved it would suffer “irreparable harm” from the current state of play.

The mother of one of Elon Musk’s children sues xAI over deepfake images. Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer, accused the artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, of illicitly letting users digitally undress her without her consent. Separately, Canada and Japan are the latest governments to investigate xAI over the feature, which the company recently barred in jurisdictions where such activity was illegal.

The pay-for-power campaign

As part of a focus on easing America’s affordability crunch, which is expected to be a major issue in midterm elections this year, Washington has taken aim at industries from credit card issuers to pharmaceutical companies.

Now joining that list is Big Tech, over the seemingly nonstop expansion of data centers meant to support their artificial intelligence ambitions.

The latest: Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, introduced legislation yesterday that would require tech giants to significantly subsidize any upgrades to electrical grids needed to power data centers.

“What we hope to do is create a national set of rules so that no matter where someone wants to build a data center, consumers know they are not going to get screwed with the costs,” Van Hollen told The Times.

The numbers: American tech giants are expected to spend $1.2 trillion on A.I. infrastructure by 2030, according to a Bank of America report released yesterday. That will place a huge burden on America’s power grid — and increasingly on individual Americans’ electricity bills, a reality confirmed by this week’s Consumer Price Index report.

President Trump has also taken an interest in the issue. “I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers,” the president wrote on Truth Social this week.

He added that his administration had been working with Microsoft on the matter. The tech titan this week said it would “pay our way to ensure our datacenters don’t increase your electricity prices.”

The issue is especially acute in the Mid-Atlantic, where PJM Interconnection runs a 13-state electricity market that is the nation’s largest — and whose grid has the most data centers in the country.

The White House and several governors are set to introduce a plan today that would require PJM to hold a special auction for tech companies to bid on new electricity contracts. It’s intended to force such businesses to finance new power plants. A White House official told Bloomberg and The Times that an auction could raise as much as $15 billion.

(PJM itself appeared to have little to do with the move: A spokesman for the company said that “we were not invited to the event.”)

The lobbying showdown over crypto legislation

A major crypto bill appeared headed for a big Senate committee vote — until late on Wednesday when one of the industry’s biggest moguls, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, publicly blasted the proposal as written. The legislation was quickly put on hold.

The reversal put the spotlight on an escalating lobbying showdown between crypto and the trillion-dollar banking industry, Niko Gallogly reports.

Crypto and banking lobbyists have swarmed Washington in recent months, seeking to shape the landmark crypto legislation, which would provide a market structure to the industry.

High on Armstrong’s list of complaints is a series of amendments that would limit so-called crypto rewards on stablecoins, the digital tokens tied to the value of the dollar.

(Armstrong also criticized what he described as potential limits to the powers of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which would be a leading crypto regulator, and a ban on so-called tokenized equities, though some companies that offer such instruments dispute that view.)

Banks want the bill to quash stablecoin rewards. They argue that the payouts are a form of unregulated interest payments that could drain away billions in bank deposits. Yesterday, the American Bankers Association shared a petition signed by thousands of members calling for a prohibition on such rewards and promoting the relative safety of banks.

Banks “face a rigorous set of regulatory requirements in a whole host of areas that none of these companies face,” said Jess Sharp, executive vice president of advocacy and innovation at the A.B.A.

The crypto industry’s response? Banks are trying to limit competition.

Despite the setback, there is optimism that a compromise can be reached soon. “Senators from both sides want to get back to the table, and we’re ready to do our part,” Coinbase’s chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, told DealBook.

Talking A.I. with a C.E.O. of LexisNexis

Every week, we’re asking a leader how he or she uses artificial intelligence. Sean Fitzpatrick, who leads the legal information business of LexisNexis North America, U.K. and Ireland, told DealBook he has set a productivity improvement goal for every manager. His answers have been condensed and edited.

How do you personally use A.I.?

I’ll use it for ideation if I’m entering a situation that I’m not particularly familiar with. I was buying a car, and I was like, what are the things I should be asking?

Have you given any directives to your team about what you want them to do with A.I.?

What I tell all of my managers is I expect each of you to improve the productivity in your particular area by 10 percent this year using ChatGPT. It’s a key performance objective.

We’re seeing them do pretty amazing things. In engineering, about a third of our code now is written using A.I. And we’re seeing about a 20 to 30 percent improvement in productivity in our engineering team as a result.

How easy is it to measure if the 10 percent improvement has been made?

It’s not easy. We can definitely see if sales performance got 10 percent better or 20 percent better, but what’s more difficult is the attribution part. How much of that was because of ChatGPT versus a price change? How much of it was because we made the product better?

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Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter misattributed a quote from Wells Fargo’s earnings call. The speaker was Charlie Scharf, the bank’s C.E.O., not Mike Santomassimo, its C.F.O.

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