Money, moguls and #MeToo converge for investment bank’s annual conference
Mark Dee
Jul 6, 2018
Apple CEO Tim Cook, right, strolls through Sun Valley Village with Apple Security Executive Jim Neidig during last year’s Allen & Co. annual conference. This year’s event kicks off Wednesday, July 11. Express photo by Joshua Murdock
Private jets double-parked at Friedman Memorial Airport. Nondisclosure agreements, fresh off the press. You won’t see any formal signs for Allen & Co.’s annual media, business and technology conference, but entering its 36th iteration at Sun Valley Resort, locals know where to look.
Expect the telltale giveaways to continue through the weekend and into next week, as a select cadre of the world’s richest and most powerful converge on the Wood River Valley for the hush-hush affair, slated to start Wednesday.
Though guests rarely say what happens in the Limelight Room of the Sun Valley Inn, the Allen & Co. effect ripples countywide. For many residents, the week of work, ranging from babysitting to catering to guiding gigs, has become a welcome rite of July, complete with boosted wages and, often, a fat tip.
The conference, like the company itself, is secretive. Allen & Co., a private Fifth Avenue investment bank, doesn’t have a website. It counts George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, among its employees. Organizers and staff are contractually bound to silence. The schedule, as always, stays under lock and key. Presentations and panels cover a wide range of topics, but have focused on politics and on the technology, media and telecommunications sector—the bank’s specialty.
Still, much of the real business happens outside the classroom, yielding very big and eventually very public results. Time Warner’s doomed merger with AOL is rumored to have grown from the meeting. So was the $250 million purchase of The Washington Post by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. Last year, Bezos’ top competition for that title shared the same room, as four of Money magazine’s five richest people on the planet came to the conference: Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg.
