The billionaires’ ‘summer camp’ that media moguls built is now run by the tech titans trying to replace them

When Allen & Co. convened its first Sun Valley conference in 1983, it was a media-finance gathering: 35 guests, one speaker, and a New York investment bank looking to bind itself to the moguls who ran America’s newspapers, studios, and broadcast networks. 

Four decades later, the media chiefs are still there, but they’re no longer the main event.

This week, the invitation-only retreat now known as “summer camp for billionaires” got underway again in the Idaho mountains. Private jets stacked at Friedman Memorial Airport, security sealed off the Sun Valley Lodge, and a few hundred of the world’s most powerful people started getting cozy. The confirmed arrivals so far—like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Apple’s Tim Cook and John Ternus, Palantir’s Alex Karp, and many more) show where power at billionaires’ summer camp has migrated.

What is the Sun Valley conference?

The conference is hosted each July by Allen & Co., a small, private New York investment bank that has advised, founded, or invested in companies from Google to Coca-Cola to News Corp. It remains one of Wall Street’s last family businesses. As Fortune’s Carol Loomis observed........

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