WEF Young Global Leaders List Update

The list of Global Leaders of tomorrow and Young Global Leaders has now been updated with 2024 and 2025 participants and complemented with statistic graphs.

Background

While Jacob (my husband, for those that don’t know) was writing the first Swedish edition of the Global Coup d’Etat in September 2020, he noticed that many prominent players of the global agenda, including Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Sanna Marin, Leonardo di Caprio, and numerous other tech pioneers, political leaders, and celebrities, were or had been participating in World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders” or the preceding “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” programmes and wrote a section about this in his book (which in the third edition 2021 was updated with a longer list).

In February 2022, investigative journalist Cory Morningstar from the Wrong Kind of Green posted the now famous Harvard interview with Klaus Schwab where he bragged about WEF “penetrating the cabinets” and named “Mrs Merkel”, “Vladimir Putin”, “Prime Minister Trudeau”, “the President of Argentina” [Mauricio Macri] and others as having been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, which Jacob reposted in a blog post, and added a list of some prominent YGLs from his book.

Klaus Schwab interviewed by David Gergen at Harvard

Shortly after, Jacob was looking into the G20 and had begun listing some Young Global Leaders with G20 connections.

This gave me the idea of making a list of all GLT and YGL as an easy-to-use reference. Just as I was starting this project, I happened to hear that Dr. Robert Malone was also planning on compiling such a list and contacted him to see if we could collaborate instead of separately doing the same job. He approved and put me in contact with his research assistant, Anita Hasbury-Snogles. Together, she and I assembled the list (with some input from others as well). This manual labour took several months and was arduous indeed!

It was first published in June 2022, and updated in September 2023. After this, we have not had time to keep it updated, but over the last few months I added the 2024 and 2025 participants, updated some links and filled in categories with more information, corrected minor errors, removed duplicates, and made more precise (and hopefully more accurate) subcategories to be used as basis for statistics. There are now over 4.250 officially listed or confirmed participants since 1993.

The updated list can be accessed from Jacob’s blog (click the button):

Statistics

When putting the numbers into graphs, some interesting patterns and trends emerge.

Regions

The regions from which the young participants are selected are dominated by North America (25%), Europe (23%), and Asia (25%)—one might say a distinctly trilateral distribution. But efforts have clearly been made to make sure that “no one gets left behind” in order to make the global technocratic agenda come to fruition, with the help of these agents of change in key positions in as many countries as possible.

And, to briefly get back to what inspired this project:

Over 78% of GLT/YGL participants come from G20 member states (which also include the European Union and (as of 2023) the African Union (after discounting some AU states that have been suspended due to coups or conflicts).

Nearly 20% participants come from BRICS member states (of which six countries are also members of G20; Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and Saudi Arabia).

Sectors

The sectors are totally dominated by the Business sector (51%) and the next largest is the Government sector (17%).

Jacob’s first comment when shown this pie chart was “Ah, Public–Private Partnership!”—which is what the World Economic Forum is all about.

The World Economic Forum, committed to improving the state of the world, is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. (weforum.org).

Media is categorised separately by WEF but is of course also a business, just like Social Entrepreneurship and parts of the Culture sector (art, entertainment, music, photography, religion, and sport—including some well-known celebrities).

The Think tank sector is now considered a subcategory of Academia but is shown separately in this chart for clarity.

Social Entrepreneurs and Civil Society (foundations, charities, and NGOs) are in many cases doing real good in the world, while some seem founded primarily as astroturfing tools for the agenda.

Looking closer at the Business sector, the subcategories are dominated by Finance (banks, investment firms, insurance, real estate, fintech, stock exchanges), followed by Tech & Telecom, Services (mostly consulting firms, but also law firms, marketing, analytics, and recruitment), Conglomerates (groups or holding companies), Industry, Health & Pharma, and Energy.

The Government sector is dominated by politicians (including Heads of Government, Ministers, Representatives, Governors, Mayors, party leaders and other politicians). The second largest subcategory is Public Servants. There are also Intergovernmental positions (in UN bodies or the European Union), Diplomats and Royals.

Astoundingly, many have or had their positions of power while in the GLT or YGL programmes, and a notable portion are currently incumbent, or have held key positions during the crucial last decade.

In this update, some individuals and organisations have been marked in bold and/or in the new columns to indicate a significance in the overarching global technocratic agenda: Agenda driving (organisations), Sustainability (climate, DEI, ESG, SDGs, MDGs), Tech (leading tech pioneers, AI, surveillance, 4IR etc.), Health (COVID-19, vaccines etc), Notable (persons of potential interest, including Nobel laureates, celebrities, billionaires, royalty, critics, and a few good initiatives), and Bad apples (YGLs convicted of felony or suspected of corruption, financial irregularities etc).

Sex Distribution

Starting out with a majority of male participants, the percentage of female participants has steadily increased since 1993, surpassing male participants in 2014 and since then around equal or slightly over. This reflects the global trend of using more female leaders in top positions of business, politics, academia, and media, in order to forward the technocratic agenda in a “softer” way.

This deliberate feminisation of typically male sectors or positions can create problems, according to Helen Andrews article, The Great Feminization, and subsequent interviews.

This WEF insider recently revealed the real reason behind ESG (which some of us have suspected for a long time).

This, too, is clearly reflected among more recent Young Global Leaders, for example by Malaysian Vidhya Ganesan (YGL 2024) who is “passionate about about advancing women in the workforce at McKinsey and beyond”; Crown Priness Victoria of Sweden (GLT 2001) who is “passionate about the environment and climate change”; Indian minister Nara Lokesh (YGL 2018) who is “passionate about accelerating technology penetration and rural development”; Haja Salimatu Bah (YGL 2025), Sierra Leone Minister of Communication, Technology and Innovation, who has a “passion for technology and innovation”; or Mongolian State Secretary Bolor-Erdene Battsengel (YGL 2022) who is “passionate about her work on digital inclusion in Mongolia” and bringing AI to herders.

But, just as clarified in the above interview with the WEF insider, it is ultimately about business and power, even if the idealism of the individual agents-of-change used to implement the global agenda may in many cases be genuine. Most are probably unaware of who are pulling their strings and why.

Two quotes from Rockefeller: Controlling the Game springs to mind:

A unique opportunity is before us to bring together our age and experience and money and organisation with the energy and idealism and social consciousness of the young. Working together, almost anything is possible.
(John D. Rockefeller III, This Cybernetic Age, 1969)

The RBF has supported ‘allied voices for climate action’ that include businesses, investors, evangelicals, farmers, sportsmen, labor, military leaders, national security hawks, veterans, youth, and governors and mayors.
(Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Sustainable Development Program Review 2005-2010)

Besides these Young Global Leaders, WEF has separate programmes and communities for Global Shapers (with around 11,500 members in over 500 city hubs in 150+ countries), Family Business Community (for the owners and heirs of the world’s leading family businesses),Young Scientists, Technology Pioneers, and Social Entrepreneurs.

Highlights from the list will analysed in a separate posts.

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