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Good morning from Beverly Hills!

We’re halfway through America’s bi-coastal version of Davos — the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend in Washington is done, and now we throw forward to the 25th annual Milken Global Conference in Los Angeles, which runs through May 4.

We’re also at the start of a warm weather summit season: Over the next eight weeks, we’ve got the G-7 and NATO summits, the Summit of the Americas, World Economic Forum, Oslo Freedom Forum and the Copenhagen Democracy Summit.

This is first of four special editions of Global Insider from the Milken conference — please forward this to other participants who might enjoy it.

Goals #1: Did you embed your contact details in a tiny near field communication card in your nails? If not, then you’re not as cutting edge as Evin McMullen, the co-founder and CEO of Disco.xyz, who simply presents her nails when it comes time to network.

Goals #2: Why didn’t Kim Kardashian arrive at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on a scooter? Because she’s not as cool as Rockefeller Foundations’ Ashley Chang.

MILKEN GLOBAL CONFERENCE POSTCARD

Full events details | 120 sessions will be livestreamed

After a Young Leaders Circle hike, and opening reception, Milken-goers are getting down to serious business this morning.

The conference kicks off at 11 a.m ET / 8 a.m. PT with a presentation from Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema on the release of The 2022 Milken Institute Harris Poll “Listening Project.” The goal of the poll is “to understand the most urgent needs and challenges people are facing globally.”

MILKEN HEADLINERS

This week’s on-stage line-up includes 800 business, community and government leaders. It has East Coast politicians that are likely to grab the political headlines, starting with New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. Though there will be keen attention paid also to Gwyneth Paltrow and Tiffany Haddish.

Mark Carney — now with Brookfield — is the top finance name. Gary Cohn comes into a new spotlight as vice chair of IBM (we’ll have an interview with Cohn in tomorrow’s newsletter).

Monday sessions on Global Insider’s radar:

— Insiders’ View on China: 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT

— Conversation with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai: 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT

— Strengthening economic opportunity in America: with Wally Adeyemo, Suzanne Clark and Gary Cohn, moderated by Stephanie Ruhle: also 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT

WHERE TO JOIN GLOBAL INSIDER TODAY: I’ll be moderating a discussion with John Denton (secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce) and Ailish Campbell, Canada’s former top trade official, now the country’s ambassador to the EU on how to make the world thrive through trade and commerce — at 4.30 p.m. ET / 1.30 p.m. PT.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT MILKEN

— Attendees are often genuinely excited to be there — and are willing to tweet about that excitement. By comparison, many Davos-goers have become more serious and stressed over time, and some even go to lengths to hide the fact that they’re there at all during the World Economic Forum annual meeting.

— Milken leans into its environment. Subject-wise, there’s heavy emphasis on health care, tech, creativity and racial justice, which makes sense in entrepreneurial, diverse and health-crazed California. It’s honestly hard to imagine a “wellness garden” in Davos, which is the opposite of zen.

— The participation levels. Milken is growing this year to 3,500 official participants, and yet one out of every four attendees is also a speaker. That gives an undercurrent of inclusion to what is still a fairly exclusive event. Contrast that to the heavily controlled and coded badge system at the World Economic Forum, which is all about limiting where you can go and who you can interact with.

TELL YOUR MILKEN STORY

CONFERENCE PRO TIPS: Former U.S. ambassador Curtis Chin, now Milken Institute’s Asia fellow, has advise for first-time Milken-goers: maximize their time in the Hilton lobby (“you never know who you’ll meet”), join sessions outside your main areas of knowledge and wear comfortable shoes.

Global Insider suggests you shed your inhibitions and visit the wellness garden. The fact that you’d never expect to find calm near a busy L.A. road only added to the pleasant surprises you find there.

Did you know? Milken’s speakers are so prolific, the conference runs a pop-up bookstore of their latest tomes.

THE GOLDEN BILLIONAIRE STATE: This month, Forbes reported that California has more billionaires than any other state in the U.S. — 186 out of the country’s 735 billionaires. Tech moguls, unsurprisingly, are top the list and account for around 100 of the state’s billionaires. Two out of every three Golden State billionaires live in the Bay Area.

Billionaire reader update: Speaking of billionaires… I asked and you delivered. Thanks to the second billionaire reader of Global Insider for identifying himself on Friday. Are you the third billionaire? I still want to hear from you: [email protected]

L.A.’S NEXT POW-WOW — IS THE SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS SET TO FIZZLE? Former Ambassador Todd Chapman and CSIS’ Daniel F. Runde argues that as host of the ninth Summit of the Americas from June 6-10, President Joe Biden “must bring a focused and pragmatic agenda to the Summit of the Americas. Otherwise, why bother?”

The pair say the summit is the “last opportunity” for the Biden administration to present a compelling action plan for America’s neighborhood in this term, and that “several Latin American government representatives are quietly voicing reservations at sending their presidents to Los Angeles for four days, given challenges at home,” when the Biden Team is so focused on domestic issues and Russia.

GLOBAL RISKS AND TRENDS

CHINA — WILL BEIJING JOIN SHANGHAI IN WIDESPREAD DRACONIAN LOCKDOWN? Will the beating heart of global communism join China’s commercial center Shanghai in lockdown? That is certainly the trajectory — but that’s hardly the look Xi Jinping is going for as seeks “permission” from the CCP to rule for life.

EU — MACRON’S WIN AND RUSSIA WAR PIVOT TRADE DISCUSSIONS: A second term for Emmanuel Macron is raising hopes in Brussels that traditional French protectionism can give way to a free-trade boom; meanwhile, Russia-China ties are pushing the EU to focus more on India and Japan.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi today starts a tour of Germany, Denmark and France in the hopes of finding political momentum to complete an EU-India free trade agreement. Modi sees this as a way to help India recover from the pandemic, but it’s also India which has been the stumbling block in completing the deal.

DEMOCRACY — Where Foreign Correspondents Capitulated to Autocracy, by Timothy McLaughlin

WORK — THE SIDE HUSTLE BOOM: It’s an economic and cultural revolution every bit as sweeping as the pandemic-fueled boom in remote work, writes Aki Ito.

WORK — GINA RAIMONDO’S VISION FOR CORPORATE AMERICA: The U.S. Commerce Secretary frames many forms of social support as productivity boosters rather than welfare programs. She believes “corporate America is most successful when every household has health insurance, day care, early child education, broadband, job training and access to a growing supply of semiconductors made in the U.S.,” writes Matthew Winkler.

UKRAINE FRONTS

RUSSIA’S FM SERGEY LAVROV COMPARES UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY TO HITLER ... who also “had Jewish blood.” He went on to say on Italian television that “Americans and especially Canadians played a leading role in preparing ultra-radical, openly neo-Nazi subdivisions for Ukraine.”

WAR IMPERILS RUSSIA’S ENERGY CASH COW: Headlines have focused on the retreat of energy majors like Shell, BP and ExxonMobil from Russia, but it is the oil service companies — led by the trio of Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes — that will ultimately prove far more consequential. Techniques developed and perfected by the Texas pros — like using remote-piloted robots to drill rock horizontally for miles, guided by state-of-the-art imaging software to locate and push out those last drops of oil — rely on technology that has now been sanctioned. More from America Hernandez and David Herszenhorn.

START UP ARMY: War reporter Nolan Peterson made an observation worth sharing — that “for 8 years, Ukraine’s military has transformed, allowing front-line personnel to operate creatively & as autonomously as possible. There’s a start-up mentality among many troops. That’s a big change from the strict, top-down Soviet chain of command — which Russia still employs,” and which has failed it on many occasions over the past 10 weeks.

TENTH RUSSIAN GENERAL KILLED: Ukrainian authorities say that Russian Maj. Gen. Andrei Simonov was killed near the city of Izyum, in Ukraine’s northeast.

CRUDE CALCULATION: Germany’s Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday that he expects his country can be fully independent of Russian crude oil imports by the end of summer.

CONGRESS DOES KYIV: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made an unannounced trip to the Ukrainian capital on Saturday, becoming the most senior United States official to meet with Zelenskyy since the war broke out more than two months ago.

PERSPECTIVES

The mysterious case of Marina O: Anti-war protestor, or Kremlin stooge? Zoya Sheftalovich investigates.

Putin’s many nuclear threats, over many years
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Gideon Rose, former editor of Foreign Affairs and now a distinguished fellow at the Council for Foreign Relation, argues in a new piece that “the balance of terror has proved to be much less delicate than originally assumed,” in Ukraine. Rose, also the author of How Wars End, says the current conflict won’t go nuclear because the old rules of war still apply.

Mother to mother: First Lady Jill Biden will travel to Romania and Slovakia on May 5-9 to “meet with U.S. service members, U.S. embassy personnel, displaced Ukrainian parents and children, humanitarian aid workers, and educators. On Mother’s Day, she will meet with Ukrainian mothers and children who have been forced to flee their home country because of Putin’s war,” per the White House.

GLOBETROTTERS

GATES ON GATES: “I’m grieving the same way Melinda is” — that’s one of the eye-catching comments from the tech billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates, in a profile by Alice Thomson, her fifth interview with Gates over the years. Gates is prone to sticking to his script — he certainly did the times Global Insider interviewed him, but this time he doesn’t — making this piece worth your while. He says he “highly recommends” marriage and says of ex-wife Melinda French Gates: “I feel lucky that I get to work with her.” He did nearly have it all, didn’t he?

DISSENT: A Chinese national working for the EU delegation in Beijing has been detained in China for more than six months on allegations of disorderly conduct. Nabila Massrali, an EU spokesperson, said “we are concerned for his well-being.”

KLEPTOWATCH

THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE DRUG BUST: The premier of the British Virgin Islands, Andrew Fahie, was arrested at Miami airport after meeting an undercover U.S. agent posing as a drugs trafficker from a Mexican cartel. Fahie, along with two others, is charged with “conspiracy to import more than 11lb of cocaine into the U.S. and conspiring to commit money laundering,” BBC reported.

Fahie and his wife Sheila were investigated over money laundering allegations almost 20 years ago — suspected of having couriered “large sums of money” to America, to launder it after it was stolen by others from a corrupt government contract to modernize the country’s main airport, according to court papers. They denied any wrongdoing and were never charged.

Thanks to editor Ben Pauker, producer Hannah Farrow, Aitor Hernández-Morales and Stuart Lau

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