Sun Valley kicks off this week in Idaho, and the off-the-record Allen & Co. confab is again pulling some of the biggest names in media and technology behind closed doors. Mark Zuckerberg, Josh D’Amaro, David Ellison, Brian Roberts, Sam Altman and John Ternus are expected to touch down for the better part of a week.
That is why the search for Sun spikes now: the gathering still carries the aura of a place where big transactions begin, even if the dealmaking often looks smarter in hindsight than it did at the time. Four decades ago and onward, Sun Valley became known for spawning historic mergers, and at the Sun Valley Lodge Disney’s union with ABC/Capital Cities, Time Warner’s marriage to AOL and Yahoo’s sale to Verizon were cooked up.
The conference has been treated for years as a summer camp for billionaires, but some of its most famous outcomes have been difficult to defend. Disney’s purchase of ABC/Capital Cities gave it an important foothold in broadcast television; the other deals left shareholders digging out from the wreckage for a long time, and Comcast’s purchase of NBCUniversal is now being undone. Sun Valley still gets the benefit of the doubt because it sits at the intersection of money, media and technology, where even failed bets can be recast as the price of staying in the game.
Jeff Bezos gave that narrative one of its clearest markers 13 years ago, when he agreed at the conference to take over The Washington Post. This week’s guest list suggests the same thing Sun Valley has always promised: the chance for chief executives to compare notes away from reporters, with the rest of the press cordoned off from the CEOs and investors.
Thomas Friedman, Anderson Cooper and Gayle King are invited to attend if they do not report on the panel discussions, which captures the odd bargain at the center of the event. The room is intimate, the stakes are large and the talks stay private. What comes out of it this year may never be spelled out in public, but Sun Valley remains the place where the first serious conversations tend to happen.
