Buyer Beware: Why Sun Valley Has Been a Disaster for the Media Business

Sun Valley, the so-called summer camp for billionaires, kicks off this week in Idaho, and though it’s unfair to blame the conference for all of the problems plaguing the media business, it’s not a bad place to start.

Hosted by investment bank Allen & Co., the off-the-record confab is famous for spawning some of the most historic mergers of the past four decades. Everything from Disney’s union with ABC/Capital Cities to Time Warner’s marriage to AOL and Yahoo’s sale to Verizon were cooked up on the patio or the coffee shop of the Sun Valley Lodge.

It doesn’t matter that many, if not most, of these unions were disasters — examples of corporations rashly trying to achieve a scale they couldn’t sustain or maximize efficiencies they’d never realize — for some reason Sun Valley still has an irresistible allure as the once and future home of the next big deal. CEOs fall over themselves to get an invite so they can be in the room where it happened (nearly every year that Variety has revealed the guest list, someone prominent reaches out to see how they can score a ticket). After all, it’s quite the collection of powerbrokers — think Davos with a higher average net worth. This year, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Disney’s Josh D’Amaro, Paramount’s David Ellison, Comcast’s Brian Roberts, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s John Ternus are all expected to touch down at Sun Valley for the better part of a week.

But before Netflix tries to buy Sony or Apple nabs Mattel, it’s worth examining how recent media mergers led to an industry that was saddled with debt and less able to deal with the dramatic changes in the way audiences watch movies and shows and spend their expendable income. Yes, Disney’s purchase of ABC/Capital Cities gave it an important foothold in broadcast television back when that was a fantastic business to be in. But it took a long time for shareholders to dig out from the wreckage of Time Warner’s merger with AOL or Yahoo’s takeover by Verizon. And ask the employees at the Washington Post what they think of Jeff Bezos’ tenure, 13 years after the Amazon owner agreed to take over the paper at the conference. Other deals that originated at Sun Valley and seemed good at the time, such as Comcast’s purchase of NBCUniversal, are now being undone. Of course, Allen & Co., an investment firm with a lucrative side hustle serving as a financial adviser on corporate mergers, profits whether or not these deals ultimately benefit the companies’ shareholders and employees. The big winners in M&A transactions are always the lawyers and the banks.

A few media figures like the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and CBS News’ Gayle King are allowed to attend Sun Valley, provided they don’t report on what gets shared in the panel discussions that are held each morning. But the rest of the press is cordoned off from the CEOs and investors, allowed to photograph them as they walk around the resort in windbreakers or shout a few questions at them that they usually ignore. I’ve attended a few conferences over the years, and it’s a humiliating experience, one that has only grown more unbearable as security guards become more zealous about kicking reporters off the property for the slightest offense.

As a theatrical spectacle, Sun Valley had its pleasures. It was always interesting to watch the Murdochs try to present a united front, smiling through their toxic family dynamics, or to see various supplicants position themselves for Bob Iger’s throne at Disney as part of an endless succession drama. And I’ll never forget the sight of Harvey Weinstein shoveling a massive chocolate chip cookie into his mouth, devouring it like a wood chipper.

Some of the journalists granted the privilege of going behind the velvet rope have made the most of their opportunity. Bari Weiss, the Free Press founder turned editor-in-chief of CBS News, ingratiated herself to the billionaire set, finding a receptive audience for her anti-woke crusade at Sun Valley. Her rise and the destruction she has wrought at the Tiffany network can be traced back to the Sun Valley conference.

The animating idea behind Sun Valley isn’t a bad one — bringing together top minds from the world of business, entertainment, politics and other fields in a free-flowing exchange of ideas can lead to unexpected collaborations and spark insights. But in practice, it feeds into a perception among the billionaire set that they know better than the rest of us about, well, everything. That intractable problems in our education, healthcare and justice systems could all be solved if they were run like Amazon or Google. For an example of how well that plays out, look no further than DOGE, the Trump administration’s cost-cutting unit overseen by Elon Musk, who received a rock star’s welcome when he attended Sun Valley a few years before taking a chainsaw to the federal workforce.

This year, there are plenty of knotty issues for the moguls and movers and shakers to debate — from the wars in Ukraine and Iran to the climate crisis and the rise of AI. But most of the corporate pashas are heading to the Rocky Mountains resort because they worry that if they didn’t show up they’d miss their chance to orchestrate the kind of transformative merger that cements legacies. It doesn’t matter that history shows us that the best deal may be the one you didn’t make.