It is not a basic requirement to be a billionaire to take part in the Sun Valley Conference – but the event is still jokingly called the “billionaires’ school trip”. The event has been taking place since 1983, bringing together the leading minds of the tech and media industry in the Sun Valley Resort in the Sawtooth Mountains (State of Idaho). There are usually no details about the content of the conference – that is exactly the purpose of the event, because the aim is to enable casual entertainment (in equally casual clothing) without direct observation from the press. Photos or interviews are therefore only taken when the tech greats arrive, but reports during the Sun Valley Conference have to be avoided. First time with John Ternus
Tim Cook was also present at this year’s edition, which started yesterday. In recent years he has usually accompanied Head of Services Eddy Cue, but this time the Apple entourage even consists of three people. For the first time, future CEO John Ternus will be there, almost two months before he officially takes office. By the way, there is no official list of participants, but there are always numerous journalists in front of the entrance area who then record the sightings of well-known company representatives.
Other notable participants
Other prominent managers this year include Sam Altman of OpenAI (CEO), Bret Taylor of OpenAI (Chairman) and Sierra (CEO), Andy Jassy of Amazon (CEO), Neal Mohan of YouTube (CEO), Alex Karp of Palantir (CEO), Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber (CEO), Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn (co-founder) and Greylock (investor), and Jerry Yang of Yahoo (co-founder). Permanent guests Bob Iger (Disney, ex-CEO) and Ted Sarandos from Netflix (CEO) were also spotted, and the new Fed chief Kevin Warsh was also seen.
A conference steeped in history – with major impacts
Allegedly, significant mergers, acquisitions and IPOs were based on conversations and ideas during the “CEO class trip”. Examples include Disney’s acquisition of ABC (1995), the merger of AOL and Time Warner (2000), Google’s YouTube acquisition (2006), Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post (2013), Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition (2014), Verizon’s purchase of AOL (2015) and Comcast’s entry into NBCUniversal. The deals were not always decided there – Sun Valley was often the place where contacts, trust and the first threads of conversation emerged.
