The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference is at the halfway mark and dozens of the world’s most influential people have three
days left to forge relationships and make deals in comfort and secrecy.
The week-long conference is hosted and wholly funded by Allen & Company, a private investment firm, at a resort in Sun Valley,
Idaho.
The firm specializes in the technology and media spaces, and has been the advisor in a slew of major M&A deals including
Time Warner Inc (NYSE: TWX)’s merger with
Charter, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB)’s
acquisition of Whatsapp and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)’s acquisition of Yahoo!.
Allen & Company was also one of the underwriters for Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL)’s and Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR)’s IPOs.
The conference is invitation-only and shrouded in secrecy. The public and media have limited access to the resort, and the
complete list of invitees is unknown.
Who’s Who At Sun Valley
The conference is attended by business leaders, political actors and major philanthropic and cultural figures.
Some of the names on the list include Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A) (NYSE: BRK-B) CEO Warren Buffett and Discovery Communications Inc.
(NASDAQ: DISCA) CEO David Zaslav.
Political figures in attendance include the president of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haas, Colorado Governor John
Hickenlooper, and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who are there on their own time and money.
Other leaders schmoozing it up in Sun Valley are coming from:
-
Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ: CMCSA).
- Dell Inc.
-
EBay Inc (NASDAQ: EBAY).
-
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA).
-
General Motors Company (NYSE: GM).
-
GoPro Inc (NASDAQ: GPRO).
- Nextdoor.
-
Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP).
- Y Combinator.
-
Zynga Inc (NASDAQ: ZNGA).
A History Of Deals
A number of high-profile mergers and acquisitions were born out of the conference, which Allen & Company first hosted 1983.
They range from longstanding successes, like Walt Disney Co (NYSE: DIS) and ABC at the 1994 conference, to the ill-fated merger of Time Warner with AOL,
which was conceptualized at the 1999 conference.
Comcast and NBCUniversal had already been in talks for months prior to the former acquiring the latter, but the deal wasn’t
struck until Comcast Chief Operations Officer Steve Burke and Jeff Immelt, the CEO of then-NBCUniversal owner General
Electric Company (NYSE: GE), met in secret on the
resort’s golf course.
Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer was also seen having drinks with the CEO of AOL, Tim Armstrong, at the conference in 2014, prompting
speculation of a deal between the two. Just this year the companies did
merge into the newly-titled Oath, under Verizon.
Even individuals have made moves at the conference, with a highlight being Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com,
Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), acquiring the Washington Post
in 2013.
But the conference is not only host to business talks. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg met then-mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker
at the conference. Afterwards, he donated $100 million to Newark’s public schools.
What To Look For
The general public won’t be able to get the details of what went down in Sun Valley until at least next week, but there are a
few things investors will be looking out for.
Spotify’s founder Daniel Ek will be in attendance, and the company has already indicated that it is eyeing an IPO. The music streaming
service is the second largest independent subscription service after Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX).
Allen & Company may come out of the weekend as an underwriter, or the Spotify could end up in talks to scrap any IPO plans and
be acquired instead. The company is still not profitable.
Verizon is likely scouting a new path to its own video programming in the face of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:
T)’s acquisition of Time Warner, which owns HBO and Warner
Bros.
Verizon is reportedly open to Comcast and CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS), especially now that Disney is definitely not being considered for a deal.
The CEO of Slack, Stewart Butterfield, also received an invitation to the conference. Recently there have been
chatter of an acquisition by
Amazon.
Amazon itself is among several tech giants moving to expand their original, long-form content offerings. Facebook, Apple and
Google are likely scouting new advertising and production partnerships.
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