Davos recap: Elon Musk talks robot-powered future, robotaxi rollout in first-ever Davos appearance

On Thursday, we got to see Elon Musk grace the stage of the World Economic Forum for the first time. He didn't make much of a splash.

Earlier in the day, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he was "living rent-free in Trump's head," and Business Insider's Dan DeFrancesco got turned away from a cloakroom for not having sufficiently high WEF status.

On the geopolitical front, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked businesses to open offices in his country and got two standing ovations, while Trump formally launched his Board of Peace.

Business Insider won't be liveblogging on Friday as Davos wraps up around midday local time.

So that's it.

Goodbye, and thanks for reading!

Speaking of Trump's journey home, Air Force One took off from Zurich Airport at 5:37 p.m. local time (11:37 a.m. ET).

Trump's convoy was seen earlier driving away from Davos before Elon Musk's speech.

From touchdown to take off, the president spent about 29 hours in Switzerland.

"I would encourage everyone to be optimistic and excited about the future," he says.

"For quality of life, it is actually better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong rather than being a pessimist and right," he says to laughter.

And with that, Musk's first time at Davos comes to an end.

"Humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. We do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory," Musk says.

"By the end of this year, I think they will be doing more complex tasks, but still deployed in an industrial environment," he adds.

"By the end of next year, I think we'll be selling humanoid robots to the public. That's when we are confident that it's very high liability, very high safety, and the range of functionality is high."

Musk said in 2024 that he wanted to sell Optimus in 2026.

"I do think it is a very solvable problem," he says.

"When we figure out what causes ageing, I think we'll find it's incredibly obvious."

Stopping aging isn't necessarily a good thing, he adds.

"There is a reason we don't have a longer life span. There is some risk of an ossification of society, of things getting locked in place."

"We will actually make so many robots and AI that they will actually saturate human needs."

"My prediction is that there will be more robots than people."

"Who wouldn't want a robot to, assuming it's very safe, watch over your kids, take care of your pets?"

"Open offices in Ukraine. Yes, a little bit of a risk, but we decided to be honest today," the Ukrainian president said to some laughs.

"Give jobs to our people."

"This is real support: jobs, money, investment."

As he left the stage after his speech, he got a second standing ovation from the Davos crowd.

Despite being probably the most prominent figure in the world of business over the past decade, today's appearance will be Musk's first in Davos.

He has a difficult history with the conference, having frequently criticized it in the past, famously calling it "boring af" ahead of the 2023 edition. That incident sparked the WEF into publicly saying it had not invited Musk since 2015.

He was invited last year, when he was heading up Trump's shortlived Department of Government Efficiency, but did not attend.

Elon Musk's private jet is back in tracking range, flying over France and about 200 miles from Zurich.

For much of the past week, Musk has been locked in a war of words with Michael O'Leary, CEO of Europe's biggest airline Ryanair, over Starlink.

Perhaps ironically, Musk's jet earlier crossed paths with a Ryanair flight from Madrid to Dublin, which passed behind it by about 70 miles, with their flight paths intersecting roughly 10 minutes apart.

During their spat, Musk and O'Leary called each other idiots and Musk polled X users on purchasing the airline and installing a new boss named Ryan.

Then, on Wednesday, the Irish airline used the beef to promote its January sale and said it would hand-deliver a ticket to X's Dublin offices. Musk is yet to reply.

After the massive buzz around Trump's speech yesterday, things are a little lighter in terms of big name speakers at the World Economic Forum on Thursday. Still, it's Davos, so even a light day would be the envy of pretty much any other conference on earth.

The day's main event, of course, is Elon Musk's appearance at 4:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. ET), but other highlights include a special address from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at 2:30 local time (8:30 ET). Zelenskyy, who initially planned to skip Davos this year, will also meet Trump while he is in Switzerland.

Elsewhere, Business Insider Editor In Chief Jamie Heller has just kicked off a discussion about living autonomously with MIT academic Daniela Rus, Gecko Robotics CEO Jake Loosararian, and Shao Tianlan, CEO of Mech-Mind.

Continuing our coverage of coat rooms across Davos, I was turned away from Cloakroom A in the Congress Center today.

"We're only taking white badges today. Sorry."

White badges are the top dogs in Davos' weird caste system, having access to basically everything. That's followed by silver (government officials), orange (media-types like me), black (security), and finally hotel badges.

There was a free coat room for us non-white-badgers just around the corner. But that didn't stop some from feeling offended.

I heard one attendee who was turned down muttering "discrimination" under his breath.

It looks like Elon Musk is heading to Davos on his Gulfstream G650 private jet — the model of choice among the very wealthy. When I was tracking private jet arrivals on Monday, it was the most frequent type, representing 31 of 157 landings at nearby airports.

According to JetSpy data, G650s that have landed near Davos this week include ones owned by: Aramco, Bill Gates, BlackRock (twice), Blackstone, The Carlyle Group, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Google, and ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg also own G650s, per JetSpy.

None of Europe's three largest economies, Germany, the UK, and France, will be signatories to the board today.

In an interview with the BBC from Davos this morning, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said that this was in part due to "concerns about President Putin being part of something which is talking about peace when we still haven't seen any signs from Putin there will be a commitment to peace in Ukraine."

The Kremlin earlier this week said Putin had been invited to join the initiative, which is focused on overseeing Gaza as part of plans to find a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Though Trump's centerpiece appearance at Davos was his 70-minute-long speech yesterday afternoon, the president is back onstage this morning.

He's launching his Board of Peace, alongside other world leaders, including Argentine President Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

"Just about every country wants to be a part of it," he tells the crowd.

He then describes the world's troubles as "really calming down," saying: "Just one year ago, the world was actually on fire."

Elon Musk's private jet is somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean as he makes a last-minute trip to Davos.

The Gulfstream G650 took off from San Jose International at 7:12 p.m. PT. About six hours later, ADS-B Exchange data had it some 2,200 miles away from Zurich.

The airplane was last recorded traveling at 660 miles per hour, which means it should land in Switzerland before 2 p.m. (8 a.m. ET). Davos is then about a 40-minute helicopter ride away.

We don't know for sure Musk is on the jet, but it seems highly likely.

Unlike President Donald Trump, who was delayed yesterday due to a fault with Air Force One, Musk should have plenty of time to get to Davos on time.

David Sacks spoke on Wednesday at the USA House alongside Michael Kratsios, the White House's director for science and tech policy. He pushed back on the most alarmist interpretations of Elon Musk's warnings about AI and jobs, arguing they strip out a crucial part of Musk's broader vision.

According to Sacks, Musk isn't predicting a sudden mass-unemployment crisis so much as a radically different economic system, closer to a "Star Trek"-style world where technology supplies basic needs.

"Look, I think that Elon is directionally correct about the future. I think we are heading towards a country of abundance. Rising living standards for everybody, greater productivity. I think that will lead to rising wages. I don't think it's going to put everyone out of work."

I've usually thought of Davos as being more dominated by finance and blue-chip companies, but clearly, tech has taken over.

Walking down the main thoroughfare in Davos is always fun because all the shops that are open the rest of the year are taken over this week by companies that host "houses" to showcase their brands and host clients and events.

Walking along the street this year, it seems like 80% of the houses are tech. Palantir and Meta (with its free hot chocolate stand) had the most visible presence. Amazon's house was surprisingly small. Google was far away from the main action. Lightspeed was the only venture capital firm I saw, with its odd retro "Lighthouse."

It is also interesting to see who is not here. OpenAI has no house, and Sam Altman did not come, though some executives are here. Elon Musk was not originally part of the program but was a last-minute addition today.

There were so many techies here that sometimes I felt like I was in San Francisco.

I asked a couple of startup founders why they came so far to be here, and the consensus was that there's nothing like Davos for the efficiency of meeting potential customers and investors who are all packed into a tiny Swiss village for the week.

Waiting in the cold in a long line for a party for General Catalyst and Lightspeed, I asked one founder why he traveled here.

He told me Alexandr Wang, founder and former CEO of Scale AI, who is now Chief AI Officer at Meta, advised him that Davos was highly useful because Wang said last year he signed almost a third of Scale's customers in the short time he was there.

Harvey cofounder CEO Winston Weinberg told me that dealmaking started even before I arrived, with many transactions happening in the business-class sections of flights to Zurich from San Francisco and New York.

Jamie Heller, Business Insider's editor in chief, led a panel on smart factories that dove into the future of physical AI and what's needed before robots become mainstream in homes and factory floors.

One phrase dominated her conversation: digital twins. Execs from Siemens, Agility Robotics, and Automation Anywhere agreed that what once sounded like a possibility in the distant future is now delivering real productivity gains.

"You want to have this digital twin alive once you are running your production because it allows you to optimize all the time," Siemens' CEO Roland Busch said. "If you make a change, if there's something going wrong, you see real-time what's happening on the shop floor."

Management is a bug, not a feature, in a career path at Cisco.

Jeetu Patel, Cisco's president and chief product officer, is a big proponent of the great flattening. In fact, if you're only managing people at Cisco, you're doing something wrong.

"I want everyone to be a player-coach. I don't want anyone to be a full-time manager. We don't need full-time managers at Cisco," he told me on Wednesday.

He called the philosophy "foundational" to Cisco. People need to think about how they want to change the world and what they can do to contribute to that change, rather than focusing on specific job titles.

"If in the pursuit of that change, you have to go out and reluctantly manage some people, then go ahead and do that," Patel said. "But management, in and of itself, is not a full-time job."

Conor Hillery and Matthieu Wiltz are well-versed in how European investors are feeling.

JPMorgan's co-CEOs of EMEA took a two-week trip across Europe and the Middle East to meet with clients at the start of the year. It corresponded with escalating geopolitical situations in Venezuela and Greenland, making for a unique trip.

When I spoke to them on Wednesday morning, before Trump's speech, they told me clients aren't necessarily looking to pull the plug on things, but the questions are mounting.

"I think it's just raising the spectre of uncertainty, so clients aren't making any definitive assumptions at this stage," Hillery told me. "In the back of their heads, they are starting to think that this could get a lot more complicated than it's been for the last few years."

And even since the trip, the situation is evolving almost minute by minute.

"There is a bit more of a question mark now compared to the first two weeks of January," Wiltz added.

There was a bit of show-and-tell from the California governor at his morning session. He took out a set of red kneepads, which he said are meant for the CEOs who kneel to Trump. He also accused some corporate leaders — he didn't name them — of "selling out to this administration."

No shortage of jabs at Trump, too. The governor called Trump an "invasive species," among other things.

"I'm living rent-free in Trump's head," Newsom said.

Newsom sparred with Scott Bessent and, on Wednesday, stared into the camera in the middle of Trump's speech with a wry, knowing smile — giving his best imitation of Jim from "The Office."

The California governor has also been making his rounds with the press, giving snappy soundbites about how the Democratic Party and world leaders should best deal with the president.

This morning in Davos, Newsom will get his share of the spotlight. He's scheduled for a panel at 8:30 a.m. local time.

ICYMI, though we don't know how you could've.

After a slight hiccup in his travel plans due to an electrical fault on Air Force One, President Donald Trump and his team swept into Davos on Wednesday for a much-anticipated speech.

The reactions? Mixed. Business Insider was in the room for his speech, and we fact-checked the president's praise for the US economy.

And after all the panic over Greenland, Trump called off his new tariffs on Europe. There's to be a "framework" in place, per an agreement with NATO, with more to come on what that'll mean.