Every year since 1983, a group of top CEOs, founders, and billionaires from a variety of industries have gathered at the Sun Valley Conference, held at the exclusive Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho under the auspices of investment bank Allen & Co., touting the company as a “summer camp for billionaires.”

But despite the golf and fly-fishing games, horseback riding, and conferences hosted by startup leaders and seasoned Silicon Valley sharks, this camp isn’t all campfire singing. Some of the biggest deals of recent years have been struck in secret conversations in the hallways.

Celebrity guests. Regulars of this camp include Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, ​​Peter Thiel, Daniel EK from Spotify, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Bob Iger from Disney and Sam Altman. In this year’s guest list, which was accessible to the American magazine Variation.

An absence that tastes like withdrawal. There are serious absences in this year’s billionaire camp. The 94-year-old veteran investor Warren Buffett will not attend his first appointment since its founding. In his place will be Greg Abel, who was officially named by the Oracle of Omaha as his successor at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett accelerated the withdrawal of the first representative line from the company he founded after his 99-year-old partner Charlie Munger passed away at the end of 2023. The experienced investor is taking a new step in the power transfer process when one of his favorite events every year does not take place.

Not expected from Elon Musk eitherAnother notable absence from the 2024 event will be Elon Musk. The South African businessman has attended the conferences in previous editions but has been increasingly less willing to join in with other millionaires and influential figures in Silicon Valley.

Apparently, as stated LuckIt is likely that Elon Musk avoids direct questions that might make him uncomfortable or avoids crossing the halls with assistants like Sam Altman or Bill Gates, with whom he has had recent fights.

If those corridors could talk…If the halls of the Sun Valley Lodge complex could talk, they would probably tell many details about how Jeff Bezos and former Washington Post owner Donald Graham argued between walks over the purchase of that newspaper. Or perhaps how Disney and ABC network executives tied the final dots of their merger in the 1995 edition as it was published. Los Angeles Times nowadays.

A highly politicized editionThe 2024 edition will take place at a time of particular political importance: after the change of government in the United Kingdom, the rise of the populist far-right in France and on the eve of the US presidential election, complicated by doubts about Biden’s health and Trump’s legal problems.

In this context, the three governors who will replace Biden (Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Wes Moore of Maryland) plan to attend the event to secure the support of the richest and most influential people on the planet. It is not excluded that after this event, some of the Democratic candidates will dare to raise their voices to impeach the current president in his re-election race.

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Image | Sun Valley Resort (Don Collier), Flickr (Smithsonian Institution), Wikimedia Commons (GODL-India)