Summer Camp for Billionaires Has Officially Started, with Bezos, Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Evan Spiegel, and the Rest of the Tech Elite Gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho
It’s like Succession, but happening in real life.
Every July, a few hundred of the most powerful people in tech and media vanish into a mountain resort in Idaho for a week. No cameras inside, no public agenda, no press beyond arrival photos and airport shots. The dress code is fleece vests and baseball caps. The guest list quietly decides a shocking amount of what the rest of us watch, read, and scroll.
This is the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, running through roughly July 11. Since 1983, it’s pulled 200 to 300 of the heaviest hitters in tech, media, and finance to a single resort where almost nothing is on the record.
This year’s crowd includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Bob Iger, Disney’s Josh D’Amaro, David Zaslav, Ted Sarandos, Neal Mohan, Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison, Palantir’s Alex Karp, the Murdochs, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. AI is the dominant hallway topic. Deals seeded here tend to surface weeks or months later.
The lore is thick. Bezos’s 2013 purchase of the Washington Post traces to conversations with then-owner Donald Graham at this conference. Disney’s ABC/Capital Cities merger had roots here in the mid-90s. Comcast-NBCU and a long list of media megadeals, including some of the worst ever signed, carry Sun Valley fingerprints.
Hundreds of private jets pack the tiny Friedman Memorial airport in Hailey. Locals protest the annual oligarch takeover, the inequality, and the jet traffic. Security is tight. Inside, it’s hiking, rafting, golf, and cocktails.
If you’ve seen Succession, the “Argestes” retreat in season 2 is a thinly veiled parody of this exact event: name tags, mountain resort, media and tech and banking power players cutting deals between hikes. Real life just has better fleece.
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