When Allen & Co. convened its first Sun Valley conference in 1983, it was a media-finance gathering: 35 guests, one speaker, and a New York investment bank looking to bind itself to the moguls who ran America’s newspapers, studios, and broadcast networks.
Four decades later, the media chiefs are still there, but they’re no longer the main event.
This week, the invitation-only retreat now known as “summer camp for billionaires” got underway again in the Idaho mountains. Private jets stacked at Friedman Memorial Airport, security sealed off the Sun Valley Lodge, and a few hundred of the world’s most powerful people started getting cozy. The confirmed arrivals so far—like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook and John Ternus, Palantir’s Alex Karp, and many more) show where power at billionaires’ summer camp has migrated.
What is the Sun Valley conference?
The conference is hosted each July by Allen & Co., a small, private New York investment bank that has advised, founded, or invested in companies from Google to Coca-Cola to News Corp. It remains one of Wall Street’s last family businesses. As Fortune’s Carol Loomis observed in a rare 2004 look inside the firm, nearly everything about the Allens’ operation is built to make guests feel privileged rather than pitched.
The company’s main focus is “forging long-lasting and lucrative relationships with corporate leaders,” Loomis wrote, adding these relationships are critical to its success. “Almost everything about the Allens’ world signals wealth.”
The Sun Valley conference is no different. It brings together hundreds of leaders across tech, media, entertainment, sports, and finance, with no public sessions, no livestreams, and press confined to a small pen near the entrance. The value of the conference lies in the networking and dealmaking that happen on the hiking trail and at the dinner table. Jeff Bezos reportedly hashed out his Washington Post purchase at the 2013 conference, and Disney and ABC executives laid the groundwork for their 1995 merger there.
The slow-motion power shift
For most of its history, Sun Valley was a media event with technology on the guest list.
The tech takeover has been building for over a decade. Silicon Valley’s biggest figures—Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook, Pichai, and Altman among them—have become its most prominent attendees. Among the confirmed arrivals this year are Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Apple’s Tim Cook and incoming CEO John Ternus, and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman. OpenAI’s Sam Altman was also photographed walking into the lodge.
To be sure, the big media names are still there, including Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav, YouTube’s Neal Mohan, outgoing Disney chief Bob Iger alongside successor Josh D’Amaro. This year’s guest list also featured OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, though neither of them has been photographed there on the ground yet.
There could also potentially be some friction there. Just months before the conference, OpenAI and Disney unwound a planned $1 billion licensing deal after OpenAI abruptly shut down its Sora video app.
Warren Buffett, a Sun Valley regular since the 1980s, is off the list again this year (as is his successor Greg Abel), as are Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, and the Trump family.
Some things never change
Outside the perimeter of billionaire summer camp, other traditions stayed.
Local activists again organized protests near the resort, this year framed around economic inequality, according to local newspaper BoiseDev.
One activist sent an email sharing information about rallies scheduled in the area “focused on economic fairness, corporate accountability, and the growing gap between extraordinary wealth and the financial challenges facing many working families,” BoiseDev reported.
Despite that, private jets still packed the tarmac. Deals will still get worked out on hiking trails and over dinner. But the balance of power has shifted.
Sun Valley was built by the media moguls who bought and sold America’s newspapers and studios. This year, the people with the most leverage in the room are the ones building the technology that could take away their power.
