Every July, dozens of tech moguls, finance barons and Hollywood A-listers fly in from around the world to a mountain resort in Sun Valley, Idaho for the annual Allen & Company conference, dubbed the “summer camp for billionaires.” The highly private annual gathering is known not only as a retreat for industry power players to mix work with pleasure but also as a seedbed for mega business deals, such as Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post and the merger between Disney (DIS) and ABC.
This year’s event will run from July 11 to July 14. The dates were confirmed over the weekend by officials at Sun Valley’s nearby Friedman Memorial Airport, who refer to the conference as the “annual fly-in event,” according to the local newspaper Idaho Mountain Express.
Specifically, the conference will kick off with private jets landing and guest registration on July 11. Closed-door meetings and lectures will run from July 12 through July 14. And attendees will fly out on July 15.
Earlier this month, Variety published a list of 50 people invited to Sun Valley this year, although there is no guarantee all of them will attend and new guests could be added in the coming weeks. The list we have so far includes familiar names like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg. Equally noticeable is the absence of several regulars from previous years’ events, including Bezos, Elon Musk and Jeff Shell, the CEO of NBCUniversal.
Who’s invited to this year’s Allen & Co. conference (so far)
Tech
Media and Entertainment
- Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp
- David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery (WB)
- Shari Redstone, chairwoman of Paramount (PARA) Global
- Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney Company
- Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment
- Reed Hastings, chairman of Netflix (NFLX)
- Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix
- Greg Peters, co-CEO of Netflix
- Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard
- Casey Wasserman, CEO of Wasserman Media Group
- Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency
- Brian Grazer, film and television producer
- Josh Berger, founder and chairman of Battersea Entertainment
- Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation
Finance
Sports and food
Politics
Media
What will they talk about?
There is little information on what’s on the conference’s agenda, since all sessions will be strictly private. But judging from the robust lineups of tech and media executives on the guest list, it won’t be surprising if the fire-side chats and mingling breaks are centered around buzzy topics like artificial intelligence and sports streaming deals.
OpenAI’s Altman and Google’s Pichai will likely get lots of questions about their large language model chatbots. And sport team owners will have plenty to chat about with their friends at Netflix and Disney.
