The Allen and Co. Sun Valley conference is upon us. Heralded as the birthplace of major mergers and acquisitions, the tech and media pow-wow attracts all the big names—last year, Sergey Brin showed up wearing Google Glass—and the live tweeting of the event is reminiscent of the Oscars.
New York Times DealBook writer Michael J. De La Merced is keeping an eye out for early arrivals, with no small amount of speculation on their conference activities—Rupert Murdoch, he writes, “may be on the hunt for newspaper acquisitions,” and Liberty Media chairman John C. Malone is “weighing a potential takeover pursuit of Time Warner Cable (whose chief executive, Glenn A. Britt, is also on the guest list).” De La Merced also suspects that DirecTV and Chernin Entertainment execs may be gunning to acquire Hulu (Bloomberg reports that Hulu will be the center of attention at Sun Valley this year, with controlling shareholders Murdoch and Bob Iger of Disney both in attendance).
He also caught Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook shaking hands with Eric Schmidt and Nikesh Arora of Google, which is either the start of the biggest merger the internet has ever seen or just, you know, some kind of primitive greeting:
But most people are just happy to catch a glimpse of Zuckerberg wandering the conference like a hoodied yeti:
With moguls slowly trickling in, talk turns to the most important matters of the conference:
Meanwhile, the guest list, though impressive, leaves something to be desired:
It’s true: The conference, which only opened up to women in 1998 (by hosting a panel about how there are apparently female business moguls—who knew?) invited only 17 of them over a decade later. So much for progress? On the bright side, there’s a nice smattering of start-ups in attendance:
It is currently unclear whether the “mini moguls” are hunting or being hunted:
On Twitter, De La Merced and Jon Erlichman of Bloomberg Television are proving to be the ones to follow for conference updates. We’re sure to see something that looks like a major deal in the making at some point. In the meantime. . .