Sun Valley, the so-called summer camp for billionaires, kicks off this week in Idaho, and though it’s unfair to blame the conference for all of the problems plaguing the media business, it’s not a bad place to start.
Hosted by investment bank Allen & Co., the off-the-record confab is famous for spawning some of the most historic mergers of the past four decades. Everything from Disney’s union with ABC/Capital Cities to Time Warner’s marriage to AOL and Yahoo’s sale to Verizon were cooked up on the patio or the coffee shop of the Sun Valley Lodge.
It doesn’t matter that many, if not most, of these unions were disasters — examples of corporations rashly trying to achieve a scale they couldn’t sustain or maximize efficiencies they’d never realize — for some reason Sun Valley still has an irresistible allure as the once and future home of the next big deal. CEOs fall over themselves to get an invite so they can be in the room where it happened (nearly every year that Variety has revealed the guest list, someone prominent reaches out to see how they can score a ticket). After all, it’s quite the collection of powerbrokers — think Davos with a higher average net worth. This year, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Disney’s Josh D’Amaro, Paramount’s David Ellison, Comcast’s Brian Roberts, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s John Ternus are all expected to touch down at Sun Valley for the better part of a week.
