SUN VALLEY, Idaho — Allen & Co.’s “summer time camp for billionaires” kicked off on Tuesday with David Zaslav of Discovery promising that the media merger frenzy created by the video streaming wars is way from over.
“We’re not finished but,” Zaslav stated when requested about extra deal targets following Discovery’s $43 billion merger with AT&T’s leisure unit WarnerMedia.
Though the deliberate merger will create a media behemoth — becoming a member of AT&T’s CNN, HBO, and Hollywood studio Warner Bros. with Discovery’s Meals Community and TLC — Zaslav says he’ll proceed to be looking out for different doable targets after the deal closes in about eight months.
“There’s lots of belongings on the market which have good IP that can most likely get new houses,” stated Zaslav upon coming into the luxury convention grounds in Solar Valley, Idaho, carrying a short-sleeve t-shirt.
Whereas Zaslav was one of many few media moguls to cease to talk to the press upon coming into the invite-only occasion, his feedback are undoubtedly on the tops of minds for different media moguls scrambling to compete with the likes of Netflix.
Different media bigs seen arriving on the luxury resort grounds on Tuesday embody Bob Chapek of Disney, Brian Roberts of NBCUniversal’s Comcast, Shari Redstone of ViacomCBS and Jason Kilar of WarnerMedia and Netflix co-CEO’s Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, the Kings of Streaming.
As moguls rolled in on Monday and Tuesday, dozens of personal jets clogged the native airport and even prevented some attendees from arriving on schedule. However at the very least a number of billionaires refused chauffeurs. Comcast’s Roberts arrived driving a black Toyota SUV, whereas Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett was noticed driving round city with a girl in an Escalade, one Solar Valley native informed The Publish.
Whereas all eyes are on the old-guard media and Silicon Valley titans, the storied confab, run by secretive funding financial institution Allen & Co., will kick off Wednesday with a keynote from youthful tech stars like Patrick Collison, the CEO of red-hot fintech startup Stripe, which is among the many world’s most beneficial personal corporations, The Publish has discovered.
Collison is scheduled to talk alongside Shopify’s Tobias Lutke very first thing on Wednesday morning at 8:30 a.m., in line with a duplicate of the confab’s confidential schedule obtained by The Publish.
Thursday’s keynote will probably be led by King Abdullah Il Ibn Al Hussein of Jordan, adopted by a session on creativity that includes husband-wife pair IAC chairman Barry Diller and dressmaker Diane von Fustenberg.
Actions, the schedule says, will embody the standard suspects of climbing, golf and tennis, but in addition (oddly for this crowd) knitting.
Lacking from the general public eye on Tuesday had been the tech moguls slated to attend, together with Apple’s Tim Prepare dinner, Fb’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the earth.
Their lack of showmanship comes as Silicon Valley faces antitrust probes in Washington, and as corporations like Apple face rising criticism by friends for the excessive charges it expenses apps that promote items through the Apple App Retailer.
Diller — an outspoken mogul who arrived on the convention in a silver mustang convertible — has lately slammed Apple’s app retailer charges as “disgusting” and is reportedly feuding with Google over accusations that IAC used misleading advertising and marketing practices.
Requested by The Publish if he expects to conflict with fellow attendees like Prepare dinner and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Diller stated “completely.”
“No, that was a joke,” he added earlier than dashing off.
