The G20 CEO Club: When Big Business and Government Merge, You Lose

Let’s Talk About What Actually Happened at the G20

Jamie Dimon. David Solomon. Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. Sam Altman. All rubbing elbows with world leaders, heads of state, and government power brokers. The financial press covered it like a feel-good highlight reel.

I covered it like the conflict of interest it actually is.

When I got asked about this on radio, the host expected excitement. Big American companies at the big global table. USA! What I gave them instead was a warning. Because I have been watching this pattern for a long time, and it never ends well for regular people.

Public-Private Partnerships: The Polite Term for Rigged Games

Here is what public-private partnerships actually are in practice. They are arrangements where the most powerful companies and the most powerful governments decide together how markets will work, which players will survive, and who gets locked out.

They dress it up in language about growth and innovation and cooperation. But what they are really building is a wall around the club. And you are not in the club.

Consider what real competition looks like versus what we actually have:

• Real competition: best product wins, best price wins, best innovation wins
• What we have: best-connected company wins, regardless of product quality or price
• Real capitalism rewards ingenuity and punishes complacency
• Crony capitalism rewards proximity to power and punishes anyone who tries to compete without it

If you build a better widget than a politically connected competitor, you still lose. Because they can absorb regulatory pressure that would crush you, access government contracts you will never see, and call in favors that no amount of product quality can overcome.

The Press Has the Same Problem

I think about the media angle here too, because it runs parallel. I remember seeing a major network anchor sitting in a VIP box with politicians at a global event, laughing it up, totally comfortable. And I thought, there it is. That is the moment journalism dies.

You cannot question power when you socialize with power. You cannot expose the people who sign your access passes. The same rule applies to business. When CEOs and government officials become fixtures in each other’s professional and social lives, the tension that is supposed to keep both sides honest disappears entirely. And when that tension disappears, ordinary people pay the price.

Too Big to Fail Means Too Connected to Compete Against

I have talked about this for years and I will keep talking about it. Too big to fail is not a compliment. It is not a badge of success. It is a taxpayer-funded guarantee that certain players cannot be held accountable by the market.

When the government takes equity positions in private companies, when it extends implicit guarantees to the largest financial institutions, when it invites specific executives to global policy summits while everyone else watches from the outside, it is making a choice. That choice is:

• Incumbents are protected
• Competitors are disadvantaged before they even start
• Innovation gets filtered through whoever has the best government relationships
• And the consumer ends up paying more for less because real competition has been quietly strangled

What You Should Take Away From This

I am not saying the executives who showed up at the G20 are villains. If you are running a publicly traded company and you get that invitation, you go. That is your obligation to shareholders. I understand the mechanics.

What I am saying is that the system producing those invitations is dangerous. It concentrates power. It crowds out the next generation of innovators. It turns regulatory agencies into industry protection rackets. And it does all of this while describing itself as progress.

I have been skeptical of this my entire career. The G20 summit did not give me any reason to stop being skeptical. If anything, it confirmed exactly what I have been warning about for years.