Above, Tim Cook of Apple.
Private jets double-parked at
Friedman Memorial Airport and nondisclosure agreements required. 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.
The
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 at 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. Four of Money magazine’s richest
people on the planet came to the conference: Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett
and Mark Zuckerberg.
Every
year, the guest list stays tightly guarded, and the 2018 invitees are no different.
These days, Charlie Rose counts
in the second camp. A longtime television journalist and celebrated interviewer,
Rose is a regular at Allen & Co., known for hosting Q&As with its most
powerful attendees.
Now,
felled by the #MeToo movement and, it seems, his own behavior, Rose is out of a
job: In November, a Washington Post investigation found that Rose had allegedly
sexually harassed eight women in the workplace. He was fired from CBS, PBS and
Bloomberg the next day. Since then, the accusations have widened: The Post
continued its investigation and, in May, published a report that identified 27
women who said they were sexually harassed by Rose, as recently as April 2017.
Rose’s
invitation to the 2018 event should not surprise anyone because he is a fellow
traveler to the Sun Valley insiders.
That
includes his old boss, CBS CEO Les Moonves, and Hollywood heavyweight Barry
Diller, who, in a March interview with The New York Times, told columnist
Maureen Dowd that “Charlie Rose ceases to exist.”
Needless
to say, “slug” Harvey Weinstein was left off this year’s list.
NBC’s
Tom Brokaw was also invited back, despite sexual harassment allegations against
him. Brokaw, who hosted the “Nightly News” for 22 years, has denied wrongdoing.
An
invitation doesn’t guarantee attendance—but it’s a tough one to turn down. Ask
any of the heavy-hitters expected to attend, according to Bloomberg, like Fox
titan Rupert Murdoch, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, General Motors head Mary
Barra, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and New England Patriots owner Robert
Kraft.
Don’t
try to ask the attendees questions because you will hear the Allen & Co.’s
de-facto motto: “We have no comments on the conference,” That message has been
the same for 35 years: nobody’s talking.
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