No room this summer on David Geffen’s mega-yacht, Rising Sun? Oligarchs and moguls needn’t worry, there’s always July in Sun Valley – Allen & Co.’s annual leadership retreat for media and tech barons in Idaho.
The “billionaire summer camp” has long been the scene for trust falls and starry panels, while the real gamesmanship of corporate acquisitions and diplomacy plays out in quaint mountain cabins while private jets idle on the tarmac. Variety has obtained a copy of the 2026 guest list, which promises another blockbuster year of chief executives and a few off-the-wall invites. Inclusion on the list does not always guarantee attendance, but here’s who will likely walk the grounds in puffer vests and jeans:
Paramount Skydance Chairman and CEO David Ellison; newly minted Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro; Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts and his co-CEO Mike Cavanagh; WBD’s David Zaslav (the man whose company Ellison is trying to buy); incoming Apple CEO John Ternus and his predecessor Tim Cook; Netflix brass Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters; Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman Ravi Ahuja; Rupert and Lochlan Murdoch of Fox (as well as Rupert’s ex-wife Wendi Murdoch); YouTube’s Neal Mohan; and Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos represent the major media players.
Moguls including Barry Diller, former Disney chief Bob Iger (along with partner and USC Annenberg dean Willow Bay) are expected. So are Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the NFL’s Roger Goodell, MLB’s Rob Manfred, CAA chief executive Bryan Lourd and the agency’s owner and Kering chairman François-Henri Pinault.
Other top management include Ellison’s CBS News problem child Bari Weiss, D’Amaro’s content leaders Dana Walden and Alan Bergman and ESPN’s Jimmy Piatro, Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer, Apple’s Eddy Cue, Live Nation’s Michael Rapino, Mattel’s Ynon Kreiz, and Jared and Josh Kushner.
Anchors and reporters, often relied on as moderators for the retreat’s programming, on deck include CBS’ Gayle King, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Van Jones, Fox News’ Bret Baier, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. There’s also some public intellectuals who may be called on to weigh in on the issues of the day such as Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and Roland Fryer, a professor of economics at Harvard whose work on race and inequality has drawn controversy.
Bill Gates and Casey Wasserman, two figures recently embattled by ties to Jeffrey Epstein, have made the list. The former is representing his eponymous foundation, while Wasserman is listed in his capacity as the Olympics chair for LA28 (his own agency was rebranded as The Team and is seeking new ownership after the Hollywood scion’s Epstein fallout).
Predictably, a host of AI leadership will head to Sun Valley – notably Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Mackenzie Price, the co-founder of Alpha School, which uses a “two hour learning model” that relies on AI-powered tech, is also on the guest list.
Some familiar names are not among the attendees despite the fact that they’ve been to Sun Valley in the past, including investors John Malone and Warren Buffett and former Paramount owner Shari Redstone.
Plenty will be on the table to discuss, from geopolitics to mergers and deals to the new technologies that are transforming the ways that entertainment is produced, distributed and monetized. Sun Valley has established itself as the place where media deals from Time Warner’s disastrous union with AOL to NBCUniversal’s sale to Comcast were hatched, so the press will be seeing which moguls linger at the picnic table or head off on a hike together for clues about who is for sale and who is in the mood to buy.
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