It all sounds a bit like a soap opera, and in a way it is, this gathering of the rich and powerful in the mountains of Idaho. Will all-round visionary Elon Musk now tie down the purchase of the short message service during a hike with Twitter boss Parag Agrawal, just like Amazon boss Jeff Bezos did there in 2013 about the purchase of the Washington Post and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg decided in 2014 to buy Whatsapp? What will happen when Disney boss Bob Chapek and predecessor Bob Iger meet, which is a kind Game of Thrones– cultivate enmity?
Speaking of game of Thrones: David Zasklav is likely to sit on the Iron Throne this year, who has just united the WarnerMedia and Discovery companies into Warner Bros. Discovery and is therefore currently considered the most powerful man in the entertainment industry – so powerful that even the Netflix bosses Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings, the cool guys of years past, may have trouble getting a private audience with him this year. Well, maybe the duck pond barbecue in the Wood River Valley will do. It is there that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is said to have poured out his heart after his speech on climate change last year about how much his divorce was affecting him.
That’s how it goes at the Sun Valley Conference, to which the investment firm Allen & Company has been inviting everyone for a week in July since 1983 to whom it considers significant enough. And because so many people accept this invitation, this meeting is also called “Billionaires’ Summer Resort”. So the private planes have been landing since the beginning of the week – usually it’s one Gulfstream G650 like Musk, Bezos, PayPal boss Dan Schulman or New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft – at Friedman Memorial Airport, and then it goes on, for example to the golf course, where the then General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt in told a cottage on the ninth hole that he wanted to sell NBC to Comcast.
Significant deals are being engineered, which is why the meeting of the billionaires is at least as much a thriller as it is a soap opera, especially since the topics this year are likely to be serious ones: the roller coaster ride of numerous share prices, the threat of recession due to high inflation, the war in Ukraine – they are that’s why the former CIA directors Michael Morell and David Petraeus were invited. The question: What encounter at the Sun Valley Conference will shape the part of the world participants are interested in?
Every year, photos are leaked and they will be interpreted intensively: who is talking to whom, who is trying to get at whose throat? It’s supposed to be about the future, justice, the state of the world. Therefore, an interesting question in 2022 should also be: Will other people be seen in these photos than mainly light-skinned men?