# Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference

The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference is an annual media finance conference hosted and funded by private investment firm Allen & Company. The conference has taken place in Sun Valley, Idaho for one week each July since 1983. The gathering typically includes major political figures, business leaders, and figures in the philanthropic and cultural spheres. The Sun Valley Conference is considered to be of particular importance in initiating and concluding corporate deals and in networking within elites in the media and business sectors.

## The meeting

Every July, the Sun Valley Conference takes place at Sun Valley Lodge (a luxury ski resort) in Idaho and lasts four days. Meetings are private and include recreational activities such as hiking, rafting and golf, lectures to suit the meeting's agenda, and evening cocktail parties and dinners. Most guests travel on their private jets to the town. Guests are also allowed to bring their families. Due to the informal yet exclusive atmosphere, the meeting was also called a “summer camp for billionaires”.

## History

The Sun Valley Conference was founded in 1983 by Herbert Allen Jr., CEO of Allen & Company. Allen & Company is a private investment firm formed in 1922, with headquarters in New York City and London. Allen & Company has advised, helped found, and/or invested in companies including BET, InterActiveCorp, Oxygen Media, Discovery Communications, News Corporation, the Coca-Cola Corporation and Google. The bank is considered to be well-connected and one of the few remaining family businesses on Wall Street. Its corporate goal is “to establish long-term and lucrative relationships with business leaders” and focuses on a small circle of exclusive clients. Allen also had ties to the entertainment industry, having purchased the film studio Columbia Pictures in 1973 and selling it to the Coca-Cola Company in 1982, after which Allen became a board member of Coca-Cola. The first meeting in Sun Valley had 35 participants and Allen as the sole speaker. Beginning in the early 1990s, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (an investor in Coca-Cola) became a regular attendee.
The main participants in the Sun Valley Conference are the heads of large media groups and CEOs of large companies. But celebrities from Hollywood and politicians were also spotted at the meeting. Over time, the number of participants has increased significantly and in 2012 there were already 628 names on the participant list. More recently, Silicon Valley's Big Tech leaders have been among the most prominent attendees, with guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Various important business were rumored to be concluded at the meeting, such as the merger of Disney and ABC News in 1996 and the takeover of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos in 2012.

## Notable guests

Previous conference guests have included Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren and Susan Buffett, Tony Blair, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Allen alumnus and former Philippine Senator Mar Roxas, former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Quicken Loans Founder & Chairman Dan Gilbert, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, financer George Soros, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, BET founder Robert Johnson, Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons, Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, NBA player LeBron James, Professor and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun, Governor Chris Christie, entertainer Dan Chandler, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post, Diane Sawyer, InterActiveCorp Chairman Barry Diller, Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman, entrepreneur Wences Casares, EXOR and FCA Chairman John Elkann, and Washington Post CEO Donald E. Graham, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Bob Iger, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Oprah Winfrey, Sam Altman/Satya Nadella/Kevin Scott and more. Several former CIA directors were guests at the conference, including Mike Pompeo, George Tenet, Michael Morell and David Petraeus.