Organisers did extend invitations to Musk, as the boss of Tesla, to join a few times in the early 2010s, but he never registered or attended the annual meeting, Zopf said.
The gathering has been criticised for a lack of concrete action that emerges after a series of sessions and speeches, while the forum itself has been the target of online conspiracy theories from those who believe the meeting involves a group of elites manipulating global events for their own benefit.
Multi-billionaire Musk, one of the world’s richest people, can certainly afford to attend Davos.
Forum members pay between 120,000 to 850,000 Swiss francs ($200,000 to $1.4m) for annual memberships, depending on the level of affiliation they want.
Many executives trek to Davos to ride the coat-tails of the meeting and hobnob with corporate executives who flock to town, at times taking pot-shots at the forum from the sidelines. For example, Richard Branson, the British tycoon behind Virgin, has reputedly come to town several times without attending the meeting itself.
Musk might be a bit busy to be palling around with the powerful in snowy Switzerland anyway.
While still grappling with the fallout from buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Musk is facing trial over his tweet about taking Tesla private in 2018.
Jury selection begins this week, and he’ll have to explain his actions under oath in court in San Francisco after tweeting that he had lined up the financing to pay for a $72 billion buyout of the electric carmaker, which never happened. It culminated in a $40 million settlement with US securities regulators that also required him to step down as the company’s chairman.
He’s also planning to step down as CEO but remain the owner of Twitter, which he succeeded in taking private last summer, though he has alienated some users and advertisers with chaotic job cuts and changes to content moderation policies.
