• Private jet traffic is skyrocketing in Davos, as billionaires and world leaders head to the World Economic Forum.
• Last year, more than 150 private jets landed in the area, registered to the likes of Bill Gates and Michael Dell.
• The event attracts some of the richest people — and most expensive planes — on Earth.

Private jets are descending on the typically quiet ski town of Davos as the masters of the universe make their way to Switzerland for the World Economic Forum.

Bill Gates, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon are among the business leaders scheduled to attend, along with world leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Donald Trump.

It’s unlikely any of these titans will fly commercial.

Last year, private aviation traffic in the region during WEF week was about five times the usual level, with more than 150 jets landing at area airports, according to JetSpy, which tracks FAA-registered aircraft.

They were registered to billionaires like Michael Dell and Robert Smith, and hailed from Palm Beach and Dubai, Paris, and Doha.

This weekend, corporate jets owned by Google, BlackRock, and IBM were among those that arrived in the area, according to data from JetSpy.

Few WEF attendees will fly into Engadin Airport, the airport closest to Davos and the highest in Europe by altitude.

“For many years, the WEF week has actually been one of the quietest weeks of the winter season for us,” Christian Gorfer, the airport’s chief financial officer, told Business Insider in an email.

Due to airspace restrictions within a 25 nautical mile radius of Davos, all flights to and from Engadin require prior authorisation from the Swiss Air Force.

“Some of our regular customers do fly in and out during that week, but WEF participants generally do not make their way to [Engadin],” Gorfer said.

Instead, many private jets and government airplanes will arrive at the Zurich Airport alongside regular airlines. It’s about a two-hour drive away from the Alpine town, but the wealthiest people will travel by helicopter instead.

The airport estimated there will be an extra 1,000 takeoffs and landings during the conference, with some landing after its typically strict curfew of 11:30 p.m. Zurich Airport is also extending the opening hours for an observation deck for planespotters and other aviation enthusiasts.

Others fly into Germany’s Friedrichshafen Airport, a Jetspy spokesperson told Business Insider.

The jets will be a parade of some of the most expensive on the market.

Many opt for the Gulfstream G650, which costs tens of millions and was the transport of choice for attendees like Gates, Louis Bacon, and executives from BlackRock and Goldman Sachs last year. Others fly on the Bombardier Global 7500, which has been dubbed the “Ferrari of the Skies.”

• Trump says the US will impose new tariffs on European countries until Denmark hands over Greenland.
• The president said the tariffs would start at 10% and increase to 25%.
• Trump has repeatedly used tariffs as leverage on what he considers national security issues.

President Donald Trump has turned to his favorite form of leverage in his effort to annex Greenland: Tariffs.

Trump said on Saturday he would impose on February 1 an additional 10% tariff on Denmark, which controls Greenland, as well as Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland, unless they agree to a deal to hand over Greenland to the United States.

The president said he would raise those tariffs to 25% in June if they did not comply. All of those countries have already been paying some form of tariff since Trump’s Liberation Day levies went into effect in August 2025.

“This tariff will be due and payable until such time a deal is reached for the complete and total purchase,” he said in a Truth Social post.

Trump’s threat comes as world leaders and CEOs gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. The president is expected to address the conference in person on Wednesday.

Trump has had Greenland on his mind since his first term, but has ramped up the rhetoric since the US raid in Venezuela that netted Nicolás Maduro.

The president says US control of Greenland is a national security issue. The Arctic country sits at a strategic point between Russia and China. The US already has a military base, known as the Pituffik Space Base, on the island. Greenland is also a base of critical natural resources, including lithium, gold, iron ore, and oil.

In a statement to Business Insider last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration was considering a range of options to pursue Greenland, including “utilizing the US Military.”

Trump’s new tariff threat comes as the Supreme Court reviews whether the president has the authority to impose broad, sweeping tariffs on whatever country he wants — and there’s a chance it could rule against the president.

• I stopped using self-checkout to reclaim small moments of human connection.
• Choosing a cashier made me rethink loneliness and daily social habits.
• Brief conversations at the grocery store changed how I see community.

I was initially resistant to the self-checkout kiosks at my local grocery store when they were introduced a few years ago.

It didn’t take long, however, for me to start choosing those kiosks when the regular check-out lines were long. By that time, New Jersey had banned plastic bags, so I reverted to the “I can do it faster myself” way of thinking, armed with cute bags made from recycled materials.

The way it had become so easy to breeze past the friendly faces of cashiers standing at the end caps of their respective, often empty, check-out lanes waiting to welcome customers might not seem unusual. For me, though, it’s started to feel like a sign of something bigger.

There’s a loneliness epidemic

Not only did I not have to interact with anyone in the case I’d rolled out to the store looking less than my best, but I was also saving time, I reasoned. A recovering dishwasher loading control freak, I’m also pretty specific about the way I think groceries should be bagged — heaviest to lightest, eggs, bread, and chips on top.

Meanwhile, the US is facing a loneliness epidemic, and our culture, especially post-pandemic, is to blame. I’m guilty of leaning into leaving my house and socializing less over the past several years, despite considering myself a social person.

According to a recent report from the American Psychological Association, many teens are turning to AI chatbots for friendship and emotional support. My college-age daughters confirmed this to be true, which should be concerning to everyone. As someone with a lifelong obsession with human behaviors, I also find it thought-provoking. It raises the question, what can we as a society do about it?

I went back to regular cashiers

I decided that the first step for me personally was to prioritize more human interaction at the grocery store. There was a part of me that missed simply saying “Hello” and asking how the person, who was specifically there to help fellow humans, was doing. If my daughters are with me, they often find something to compliment, “I like your nails,” or “Your tattoo is so cool, what does it mean?”

These days, it seems to catch some by surprise, and then to see smiles or share an unexpected laugh with a stranger — there’s something mutually fulfilling in that. In the smallest moments, we remember how others make us feel. That’s humanity, and community.

When we first moved to our little town in South Jersey, just outside Philadelphia, I knew the produce guy by name. Al had also worked on our house, and his granddaughter and our daughters went to the same elementary school. For many years, I looked forward to exchanging a few pleasantries with him and didn’t care, or correct him, when he called me Stephanie instead of Jennifer.

It’s been so nice to interact with other people

We’re officially at a point where too many people are longing for connection and to be seen, to have someone be interested in even the smallest thing about them. I make at least a couple of trips to the grocery store each week (because I’m too indecisive to plan meals in advance) and have been choosing to go to the human cashier over self-checkout whenever possible.

It’s been a breath of fresh air to overhear the chatter between cashiers and customers. I stopped in for a few things recently in anticipation of some bad weather, which people from the northeast will tell you means “milk, bread, and eggs.” The cashier, an older woman, called me “honey” but not in the passive-aggressive way Taylor Swift sings about on her latest “The Life of a Showgirl” album. She told me to be careful driving home as a coworker walked by and handed her a bag of homemade ginger snap cookies. Her face lit up.

In conversation with another cashier, a young woman, I learned she hates the cold. The high temperature that day was 25 degrees. We chatted about how she could move south, but then she’d fear tornadoes, and Florida was out of the question because of snakes. We laughed.

Walking away, I thought about how I’ve been missing the minutiae that are only present when we choose to see and acknowledge each other in person.

• A court filing revealed Elon Musk is seeking up to $134 billion from OpenAI and Microsoft.
• His claim that he was defrauded of seed money he donated in 2015 will be heard by a jury in April.
• Musk’s lawyer says he is now entitled to a percentage of OpenAI’s current $500 billion valuation.

Elon Musk is demanding that OpenAI and Microsoft pay him between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages over his claims that he was defrauded.

Details of the claim were revealed by Musk’s lawyer on Friday in a court filing ahead of a high-stakes jury trial set for April in Oakland, California.

The calculation of damages was laid out by the expert witness C. Paul Wazzan, named in the filing as “a financial economist with decades of professional and academic experience.”

The document alleges Musk was defrauded of the $38 million in seed money he donated to OpenAI when he helped found it in 2015, and states he is now entitled to a percentage of OpenAI‘s current $500 billion valuation.

Musk said on his social media platform, X, on Friday: “Can’t wait to start the trial. The discovery and testimony will blow your mind.”

Musk is suing OpenAI’s key leaders, including the CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, over allegations that the AI company misled him by shifting away from its core mission to remain a nonprofit.

Wazzan calculated that Musk should receive $65.50 billion to $109.43 billion in “wrongful gains” from OpenAI. He made a similar calculation for Microsoft’s “wrongful gains,” which equated to between $13.30 billion and $25.06 billion.

OpenAI defended itself in a blog post

Musk has been using recently unsealed court documents to attack his rival in posts on X. On Friday, OpenAI published a blog titled “The truth Elon left out.”

The blog, which provided commentary alongside excerpts from several court documents, said that Musk wanted “full control” of OpenAI, “since he’d been burned by not having it in the past.” It added that OpenAI’s leadership was surprised when Musk suggested having his kids control AGI, or artificial general intelligence, during conversations about succession planning.

The statements address the heart of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

“Mr. Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Business Insider. “This latest unserious demand is aimed solely at furthering this harassment campaign. We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever.”

Musk and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• HBO’s “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a prequel show in the “Game of Thrones” universe.
• The story is set about 100 years before the main series and 70 years after “House of the Dragon.”
• At this point in the timeline, the Targaryen family is still in power, and the realm is at peace.

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is HBO’s latest spinoff series that fleshes out the sprawling fantasy world created by George R. R. Martin.

The new show, which premieres on Sunday, is set in peacetime Westeros about a century before the first events of “Game of Thrones” — long before Jaime Lannister killed the Mad King Aerys, ousting the Targaryens from power and triggering a war for the Iron Throne.

However, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is not the oldest Westerosi tale that’s been brought to screen. It takes place several generations after “House of the Dragon,” another prequel series focused on the Targaryen dynasty, which is heading into its third season later this year.

Keep reading for a breakdown of where these three series fit on a timeline and how the main characters are connected.

Warning: Light spoilers ahead for the George R.R. Martin book, “Fire and Blood.”

‘House of the Dragon’ tells the story of a Targaryen civil war

“House of the Dragon” is adapted from “Fire and Blood,” a fictional history book about the Targaryen family, sourced from various scholars and firsthand accounts that often contradict one another.

The show focuses on a particularly fraught and bloody period in Targaryen history known as the Dance of the Dragons.

At the beginning of season one, King Viserys I sits on the Iron Throne. He canonically ruled from 103 AC to 129 AC during a peaceful and prosperous time in Westeros. (The abbreviation AC denotes “after conquest,” meaning the number of years after Aegon I conquered the realm and became the first Targaryen king.)

After the deaths of his wife and newborn son, Viserys broke with patriarchal traditions and named his firstborn daughter, Rhaenyra, as his successor. However, Viserys later remarried and had more children with his second wife, Alicent Hightower.

Upon his death, a civil war broke out between Rhaenyra and Alicent’s eldest son, Aegon II, both of whom believed they should ascend to the throne. The war was fought between 129 AC and 131 AC.

At this point in history, many of the royal Targaryens were dragon riders, meaning their armed conflicts were particularly deadly — for the humans, of course, but in a war between kin, for the dragons too.

“House of the Dragon” season three will continue to explore the escalating violence between the half-siblings and their factions. The showrunners plan to wrap up with season four, and viewers will discover which Targaryen ends up on the Iron Throne — and whose lineage continues to rule Westeros for generations to come.

‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ introduces Rhaenyra’s descendants

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” season one is adapted from “The Hedge Knight,” a novella set in 209 AC, nearly eight decades after the Targaryen civil war ended.

It’s the first in a trio of novellas about Dunk, the titular hedge knight, and his young squire, Egg.

Dunk is not a land owner, let alone a lord or a dragon-riding royal. He’s an orphan from Flea Bottom — the poorest area of King’s Landing — who was raised by Ser Arlan of Pennytree, serving as his squire. The pair did not have a permanent home, but rather roamed Westeros offering their services.

While the new HBO show and its source material both focus predominantly on Dunk and other common folk, a few characters with familiar surnames help place the story in time.

At a jousting tournament in Ashford Meadow, Dunk crosses paths with Prince Baelor Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne and Hand of the King.

Baelor is the great-great-grandson of Queen Rhaenyra and her husband-slash-uncle, Prince Daemon. (There’s a lot of incest in the Targaryen lineage. It’s best not to dwell on it.)

Dunk meets other members of the royal family at the tournament, including Baelor’s son, Valarr; Baelor’s younger brother, Maekar; and Maekar’s second son, Aerion.

This is an awkward time in history for the Targaryens. Although the family still holds its seat of power in Westeros, it no longer has dragons. The population was severely diminished by the civil war, and over time, dragon eggs stopped hatching.

Aegon I and his sisters conquered Westeros using dragons, and House Targaryen’s connection to the magical beasts helped legitimize their claim to power — as if they were ordained to rule by divine right. Without dragons, the family lacks firepower, both symbolically and literally.

Not to mention, their history of incest has led to a phenomenon known as Targaryen Madness. Some of them turn out to be disproportionately, inexplicably cruel. As Cersei Lannister later says, “Every time a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin.”

In “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” we see how the common folk have begun to question the royals. Raymun Fossoway, a squire whom Dunk meets in Ashford Meadow, privately describes the Targaryens as “incestuous aliens, blood magickers, and tyrants.”

“They find themselves finally without the thing that put them in power, which is such a precarious position to be in,” showrunner Ira Parker explained to Entertainment Weekly. “Fifty years on from the dragons, people are starting to ask the question, ‘Well, why are we still letting them be in power?'”

‘Game of Thrones’ season one is set about 100 years after Dunk and Egg’s first adventure

“Game of Thrones” begins with King Robert Baratheon on the Iron Throne.

House Baratheon managed to seize power from House Targaryen in 283 AC following Robert’s Rebellion, sometimes known as the War of the Usurper. By the time the show begins, about 17 years into Robert’s reign, there are only a few Targaryens left alive.

The oldest is Aemon, who’d long ago renounced his royal title to become a maester. He’s Maekar’s third son and Aerion’s older brother, though he never appears in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” Viewers finally meet Aemon at Castle Black when Jon Snow joins the Night’s Watch.

Maekar’s great-great-grandkids, Daenerys and Viserys, are living in exile in Essos following their father’s murder.

It’s later revealed in season seven (spoiler alert!) that Jon Snow is a Targaryen as well. He’s the long-lost son of Daenerys’ other brother, Rhaegar, and Ned Stark’s sister, Lyanna. (Yes, that means Daenerys is Jon’s aunt.)

One of Dunk’s descendants also appears in ‘Game of Thrones’

“The Hedge Knight” begins with Ser Arlan’s death, leaving Dunk to make a new life for himself. He begins introducing himself as Ser Duncan the Tall and adopts a personal sigil for his shield: an elm tree and a shooting star at sunset.

In Martin’s main book series, Brienne of Tarth recalls seeing a similar shield in her father’s armory, leading fans to speculate that Dunk is Brienne’s ancestor.

Martin confirmed this theory in 2016 at a sci-fi and fantasy convention in Baltimore. In his writing, he has also described both characters using the same phrase: “Thick as a castle wall.”

In addition to their hulking frames, Dunk and Brienne are both renowned for their loyalty and honor. Brienne became a fan-favorite character in “Game of Thrones” after swearing her allegiance to Lady Catelyn Stark, an oath that sends her on a quest to find and protect Catelyn’s daughter, Sansa.

Despite the rampant sexism she faces as an unfeminine woman in Westeros, Brienne perseveres and forms important bonds. She’s rewarded in the final season of “Game of Thrones,” when she’s officially knighted by Jaime Lannister. She ends the show as Lady Commander of the Kingsguard.

Attentive fans will know that Dunk had a similar rise. Despite his lack of wealth and status, he’s still remembered a century later in “Game of Thrones” season four, when Joffrey is thumbing through a written history of the Kingsguard. “Four pages for Ser Duncan,” Joffrey says. “He must have been quite a man.”

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
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Silicon Valley is sending a clear message about how staff should perform, and how it wants to pay them.

Instead of obsessing over punishing the bottom of the stack, Big Tech is increasingly choosing to shower rewards on the top:

• Meta’s overhauled performance system is the latest and most striking example. Under its new “Checkpoint” program, standout employees can earn bonuses worth up to 300% of their target. That’s tens of thousands of extra dollars tied purely to impact, not promotions or title changes.
• Google is loosening the funnel into its top performance buckets and shifting more bonus and equity upward.
• Amazon is doubling down on sustained excellence, allowing long-term top performers to earn above traditional pay-band caps.

What’s especially notable is how this is being driven by AI, according to Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Silicon Valley compensation data cruncher Levels.fyi.

As AI tools get more powerful, the value of high-leverage individuals is rising. The most prized employees today are “player-coaches,” people who ship work themselves while also guiding projects, mentoring peers, and shaping strategy. AI makes that hybrid role even more potent, allowing a single strong contributor to amplify their output, and their influence, without managing a large team, Musa wrote this week.

The result is a revival of the individual contributor track. You no longer have to become a full-time people manager to earn top-tier pay. At companies such as Meta, Google, Amazon, and Nvidia, senior ICs can now match (or beat) the compensation of managers simply by delivering outsized results, he noted.

For ambitious employees, the takeaway is simple: in the AI era, execution compounds. And Silicon Valley is increasingly willing to pay for it.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.