每年夏天，在传媒业并购方面颇有建树的投资银行 Allen & Co会在著名胜地太阳谷举办一次邀请制的聚会。获邀者多为科技、媒体、投资巨头，聚会谢绝媒体采访，记者们只能在外围观望。可以想象，这样神秘的闭门聚会，总会有一些神秘的话题。不少媒体并购案在这里酝酿。比如，华盛顿邮报的交易，贝佐斯和格雷厄姆就是在这里谈妥的。Instagram、Whatapps的并购，都在这里达成默契。
此外，AOL/Verizon、Comcast/NBC Universal、Disney/ABC之间的并购，也都是在这里起的头。
纽约邮报发自太阳谷的这则报道有点惊悚。Facebook会买下Twitter 吗？Facebook和Twitter？捕风捉影，还是无风不起浪？要真有那么回事，其他人还怎么玩？
马斯克是第一次参加“太阳谷夏令营”。他带来的话题，让聆听的媒体巨头们摸不着头脑。马斯克的电动车和太空飞船不会是下一个互联网入口或者平台吧 ？关于马斯克的另一个话题是，他带夫人同行。这位夫人，从2010年起，和他离了两次婚，嗯，一共结了三次，好象没有数错。这两个人中，究竟哪一个比较作？
BI的一个背景报道
The summer camp for billionaires, which kicks off in Sun Valley today, has yielded some blockbuster deals
ALEXEI ORESKOVIC Jul. 7, 2015, 9:44 AM
The so-called summer camp for billionaires kicks off this week, as tech and entertainment industry moguls convene in Sun Valley, Idaho for the annual Allen & Co conference.
Among those invited to this year’s gathering are Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk,according to Variety.Media moguls such as Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch and John Malone are all regular attendees.
The event features several days of talks about business and the economy, all of which are off-limits to the press, as well as extra-curricular activities such as rafting and golf.
But the real action comes in the meetings, power lunches, and general chit-chat the moguls engage in between the formal sessions, which often provide the foundation to mega deals. These deals usually don’t materialize until weeks or months later, which is why an army of reporters armed with telephoto-lenses stalk the area, diligently snapping pics of what could be the next blockbuster deal.
Often the photos prove nothing more than the fact that Executive A had lunch with Executive B. But with so many high-powered execs in attendance (not to mention the fact that the event is hosted by an investment bank eager to broker big corporate marriages that pay big fees), it’s inevitable that some of these encounters lead to deals.
Here’s a recap of some of the biggest deals that have been hatched at the conference over the years.
AOL/Verizon
The seeds to one of 2015’s most high-profile acquisitions were planted in July 2014 in Sun Valley.
It was there that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam had lunch together and started talking about “the way the world was going.”
Those discussions progressed over the fall, culminating with the May announcement that AOL was selling to Verizon for $4.4 million. The combination could help telecommunications giant Verizon become a bigger player in mobile and video advertising.
As for AOL, hopefully this deal will turn out better than the last big combination it sketched out at Sun Valley: the ill-fated 1999 merger with Time Warner.
Comcast/NBC Universal
Cable company Comcast morphed into a media goliath in 2011 when it acquired a majority stake in entertainment company NBC Universal.
The deal involved months of negotiations but a key moment occurred during a secret meeting at a condo near the ninth hole of a Sun Valley golf course in 2009.According to a report in the New York Times, Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE (which owned NBC at the time), met with Comcast COO Steve Burke and Comcast’s 89-year-old founder Ralph Roberts.
Immelt had already met with Roberts' son Brian, who was the CEO of Comcast, but he wanted to hear from the elder Roberts as well. The secret rendezvous required that Immelt dodge not only the gaggle of reporters at the event, but even his own colleague, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker, who was also at the conference but was not privy to the deal talks.
Jeff Bezos/Washington Post
In August 2013, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos surprised the world by announcing that he had acquired the Washington Post for $250 million.
One month earlier, Bezos had two three-hour meetings with Post Chairman Donald Graham at Sun Valley,according to the Wall Street Journal.
The meetings were not completely spontaneous. Allen & Co, the boutique investment bank which hosts the conference, had been hired by Graham to broker a deal and had reached out to Bezos months earlier. But the casual atmosphere of Sun Valley may have helped things go smoothly. “I named a price and Jeff agreed to pay it,”Graham later told Reuters.
Disney/ABC
One of the largest deals ever when it was announced in 1995, Disney’s $19 billion acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC created a media and entertainment powerhouse and put Sun Valley on the map as the destination for headline-grabbing acquisitions.
The talks began when Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner bumped into investor Warren Buffett at the conference, according to the New York Times. Eisner asked Buffett’s opinion about whether Disney and ABC should “do something together.” Buffett apparently liked the idea and suggested that Eisner talk to Capital Cities/ABC Chairman Thomas Murphy. The three then had a brief chat which set the ball rolling for serious deal talks that took place in the weeks ahead.
