The Bilderberg conference, an elite three-day get-together of business, political and academic elites — largely ignored by the mainstream media — is over for another year. At the 2025 conference, held at a five star hotel in Stockholm, around 120 politicians, military leaders, academics and corporate CEOs discussed the pressing issues of the day such as the US economy, depopulation, the Middle East, Ukraine and AI.

Gathered at the Grand Hotel alongside the Finnish president and the King of the Netherlands were the heads of huge multinational companies such as BP, Santander, Saab, Citigroup, Microsoft and a healthy smattering of tech billionaires such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former Google boss Eric Schmidt. The amount of private wealth at Bilderberg is giddying, many of the biggest conglomerate bosses are representatives of vast family holdings, such as Robert Maersk Uggla, chair of Møller-Maersk, the fifth generation of the Maersk family to lead the company.

American delegates at this year's conference included Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Republican congressman Jason Smith, and one of Trump's closest economic advisors, Robert Lighthizer, who has been a vocal advocate of US trade tariffs against China. They were joined by two senior members of the Trump administration: Kevin Harrington, a senior director at the National Security Council and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios and Harrington are both, predictably, former employees of Peter Thiel. Looking somewhat exhausted, Thiel was in and out of the Bilderberg venue all weekend, never resting, perhaps never even sleeping. Too much to do. Too many side meetings to attend.

The list of power players at the meeting would be less concerning were it not for the plethora of public officials also attending the conference, including the Greek PM, the vice president of the EU parliament, the Polish foreign minister, the UK minister for Health and Social Care, and a handful of EU commissioners. The summit was also thick with finance ministers, including those from Canada, Germany, Sweden and Turkey. The Norwegian finance minister was also present – Jens Stoltenberg, former co-chair of the group, is a conference veteran attending as the head of NATO, until he was replaced in the role by another Bilderberg regular, former prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte.