Private jets descend on Sun Valley's invite-only 'summer camp for billionaires'

Billionaires and CEOs are sleeping off any lingering holiday weekend hangovers and boarding their private jets to camp.

The annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference begins on Tuesday in Sun Valley, Idaho, marking the start of an invite-only summit known as the "summer camp for billionaires."

Between 300 and 350 aircraft — more than four times the typical number — are expected to fly in and out of the Sun Valley Friedman Memorial Airport each day during the event, carrying wealthy personalities and powerful executives in the media and tech spaces.

"While the airport experiences a significant increase in activity, the coordination and procedures that have been developed over the years make the operation a well-oiled machine," Tim Burke, the airport's director, told Business Insider.

"The airport can accommodate approximately 100 to 125 parked business jets before reaching full parking capacity," he added. "Once that capacity is reached, arriving aircraft may still drop off passengers but are then required to reposition to another airport for parking."

As of Monday evening, several jets had already arrived in the sleepy resort town, which has a population of fewer than 1,800 full-time residents. Most of the aircraft were linked to charter or fractional ownership operations such as NetJets, Flexjet, and Vista, popular choices given privacy concerns about jet tracking.

Expected guests this year include many of the usual suspects, such as Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos, Apple's outgoing CEO Tim Cook, Fox's Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg.

With regulation and IPOs in the news, AI is likely to dominate the conversation once again. Google's Sundar Pichai and OpenAI's Sam Altman attended last year, and reports say Anthropic's Dario Amodei is on this year's guest list. Last year, AI was the "1,000-pound gorilla" in "every conversation, every meeting," Tim Armstrong, the CEO of Flowcode, previously told Business Insider. This year, don't be surprised if AI costs and ROI flavor the chatter.

Media consolidation will likely also be much discussed. Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison and his deputy Bari Weiss are expected to attend, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who is leading Ellison's latest prize. (Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, the co-CEOs of Netflix, which dropped its bid for WBD, will also likely be at the conference.)

Unlike Davos and similar summits, Sun Valley is entirely off the record. Conversations take place on the golf course and during hikes between titans wearing fleeces and jeans. That relaxed environment has helped cultivate many deals, such as Disney's acquisition of ABC and Comcast's of NBC Universal.

The event, which started more than four decades ago as a media conference and has expanded to include hundreds of participants from the corporate world, is organized by the boutique investment firm Allen & Company.