The Allen & Co. Conference takes place annually in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Image: Shutterstock
If you have ever been to Sun Valley, Idaho, you might have been there to ski the awesome moguls. Sun Valley is known as a world-class ski resort town. However, recently there was an invasion of a different kind of mogul.
The annual Allen & Company conference drew around 300 of the most powerful players in media, finance, politics and technology. The four-day conference, which started in 1983, is essentially the birthplace of big deals.
Allen & Co, the investment bank the conference gets its name from, is quite a hustler when it comes to making deals. The way this happens is by their willingness to gather up all the movers and shakers in one place each summer.
Locals from Sun Valley accept the conference with a grain of salt. Although they are able to catch a glimpse of many celebrities, they just go about their day as usual.
“When you see the jets come in, you know it’s that time of year,” said Annette Taylor, barista at the Iconoclast Bookstore and Cafe.
Another local said she saw Oprah at the gym last year and some celebs have come into her store over the course of the year. She said she rarely pays any attention.
“I’m so not interested from having lived up here for 30 years,” she said.
Some attendees in the media world included Bob Iger, the CEO of Walt Disney Co., a newly single Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC/InterActive Corp., with his wife, designer Diane von Furstenberg.
There were representatives of all the major technology groups such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Zynga, and Pinterest. Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook fame, hobnobbed with Eric Schmidt and Nikesh Arora of Google over dinner.
Also in attendance were Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Henry Kravis of KKR, and many others.
The four-day conference has ushered in some pretty sweet deals in the past. For example, in 2009, Comcast brokered a deal to acquire NBCUniversal. No news yet on whether anything big will come from this year’s conference.
Interested in learning more about some of those business moguls? Check out our profiles:
- Bob Iger, Walt Disney CEO
- Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway CEO
- Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO
- Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO
- Henry Kravis, KKR co-CEO
