WEF didn’t say that property ownership would become ‘unsustainable’

A post on Facebook and Twitter appears to show a tweet from the World Economic Forum (WEF) which quotes its founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab as saying: “As humanity moves further toward a post-carbon future people must accept things like eating meat and property ownership is simply unsustainable”.

No such tweet exists. The screenshot says the tweet was sent on 24 March 2022, but the tweet does not appear if you look at the WEF’s feed around that time. The account has no live tweets that mention both eating meat and property ownership.

Though it’s possible that the account could have tweeted and deleted this, this seems unlikely for a number of reasons. Almost all of the account’s tweets include a link, whereas the screenshot on Facebook doesn’t.

The tweet also contains a grammatical error, when it says that “things […] is unsustainable”. 

But outside of Twitter, searches for the phrase he’s meant to have said only produce this screenshot, which makes it seem unlikely that this quote is real.

The WEF Twitter account has previously tweeted about eating less meat to combat climate change but not about property ownership. We can find no record of Mr Schwab saying that property ownership was unsustainable. 

Full Fact has asked the WEF whether the tweet was genuine, and we will update the article if we get a response.

The content of the altered tweet may stem from a common false claim that the WEF’s goal for 2030 is for people to “own nothing and be happy”, which likely comes from a social media video the WEF put out in 2016, which predicted that by 2030 people would rent what they needed and it would be delivered by drone.

Mr Schwab is often the subject of misinformation, most recently because of a book he co-authored called “Covid-19: The Great Reset”, which discusses how the world’s institutions may wish to address pre-existing geo-political concerns, such as global warming, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

We’ve debunked false claims that he’s been arrested for pandemic-related crimes, that Ukraine is enacting his ‘Great Reset’, that he wrote a book about organising pandemics and that he’s related to the Rothschilds.

Picture courtesy of Evangeline Shaw via Unsplash.