SUN VALLEY CONFERENCE

The Sun Valley Conference is four days in July at the Sun Valley resort in Idaho, given by the bankers Allen & Company for some three hundred guests of their own choosing: the heads of the great media and technology companies, investors, politicians, and their families. There are talks in the mornings and, in the afternoons, rafting, golf and walks in the mountains. Allen & Company pays for all of it, and the press are kept outside, in pens.

The dress is a fleece vest. For years the firm gave every guest one, with its name on it.

The Resort

In the mid-1930s Averell Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific, wanted an American ski resort to match St. Moritz and Davos, and a reason for people to ride his trains. He sent an Austrian, Count Felix Schaffgotsch, round the mountains of the West to find one. The count was about to give up when a railwayman in Boise told him that the branch line to Ketchum cost the company more in snow clearing than any other. He went, and found Bald Mountain, deep snow, sunshine and no wind.

The resort was built in seven months for a million and a half dollars, and the Lodge opened in December 1936. The railway’s engineers gave it the world’s first chairlifts, on Proctor and Dollar mountains. One of them, Jim Curran, had worked for a firm that built conveyors for loading bananas onto ships, and put chairs where the hooks had been. A publicist named the place Sun Valley.

Harriman brought Hollywood to make it known: Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, and later Marilyn Monroe. Ernest Hemingway worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls in room 206 of the Lodge in 1939, came back for twenty years, and died at his house outside Ketchum in 1961.

The Week

Herbert Allen, whose family has run its bank since 1922 and who had lately sold Columbia Pictures to Coca-Cola, held the first conference in 1983: thirty-five guests, and himself the only speaker. It has met every July since, except in 2020.

The guests fly in on the Tuesday, many in their own aircraft, more than a hundred of them in 2024, and leave on the Friday or the Saturday. The talks begin early, in the Sun Valley Inn, and none is broadcast or published. Name tags give first names only, Herbert Allen’s included. Children come, and are looked after.

The firm asks nothing of its guests and hopes, over the years, for their business. Disney’s purchase of Capital Cities/ABC took shape there in 1995, when Michael Eisner put it to Thomas Murphy on a Sun Valley pavement and Murphy said, “OK.” AOL and Time Warner were floated there in 1999, News Corporation agreed to buy Dow Jones there by the end of the week in 2007, and Comcast’s purchase of NBCUniversal began there in 2009.

In 2026 it opened on 7 July, and the talk was of artificial intelligence. Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Bob Iger and Jeff Bezos were among more than three hundred guests, and Warren Buffett, a regular for decades, stayed away.

What to Know

It meets in the first half of July, from a Tuesday to the Saturday. Allen & Company does not publish the dates.

The invitations are the firm’s alone, and so is the list. Guests stay at the Lodge or the Inn.

Fleece, or a quilted vest, and jeans; the suits stay at home. The mornings can be under fifty degrees and the afternoons in the eighties.

Friedman Memorial Airport, at Hailey, is twenty-five minutes away. It has one runway and does not reserve parking.

The mistake is to assume the aircraft can stay. On the Tuesday the airport can be drop-and-go only, and a jet that has set down its passengers is sent on to another airfield. Where it will wait should be settled before leaving.

The Court

The Sun Valley Conference is not the Court’s own, and the Court will not pretend it can put a member into it: the invitations are Allen & Company’s alone. For a member who is asked, the Court arranges the rest of the week: the aircraft and where it waits, rooms or a house for the family, and the table in Ketchum. The Court is in Aspen the week before, for the Ideas Festival.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.