Media Monday: Sun Valley Murmurs & Platner Aftershocks

**Jon Kelly** (0:01)
I think this is why people hate politics, hate Democrats, and hate the media. This guy is totally disgusting in every way, shape, possible, right?

**Peter Hamby** (0:14)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby.
It's Monday, July 13th, which means it's Media Monday. Today, Jon Kelly and I ask an important question. Did the political media do a good job covering Graham Platner and all of his scandals during his main Senate campaign? Conservatives certainly don't think so, and people on the left are also angry at the press for focusing too much on Platner's personal issues instead of the larger populist movement he claimed to be building. We also zoom across the country to Idaho for some notes from Sun Valley and the yearly Allen & Co. retreat, which these days is less of a media conference and more so a gathering of tech titans chatting about AI.
We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.
Happy Monday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. If it's Monday, it's Media Monday. We're gonna talk about two related, but very oppositional topics today. The billionaires, the media execs, the tech execs, all the AI titans just wrapped up their gathering in Sun Valley, our Dylan Byers was there. And also Graham Platner wrapped up his Senate campaign in Maine last week. We're gonna talk about whether the press did a good job scrutinizing Platner, because I said they did and I include the conservative press in that. But of course, Republicans and conservatives on X who never clicked the link and just read the tweets were attacking me saying that the left and the media were in the tank for Graham Platner. I'm sure you can say that about the left. Not sure about the media. Anyway, Jon, we send Dylan into combat territory every year to cover Sun Valley up there in Idaho. What news and notes struck you as interesting from this gathering of very rich and powerful people?

**Jon Kelly** (2:24)
Well, nice haircut, by the way, Peter. You look fresh. I think that was the problem here, that all these angry conservatives were just beating up on this handsome lib on Twitter. You can't help yourself.
The real combat violence that Dylan faced this week, as we all know, was Kara Swisher, our pal, went after him on X. I read that. It was sent to me in Page Six, hilariously. They're trying to turn this into some sort of...

**Peter Hamby** (2:48)
Kara was accusing Dylan of kissing up to people in power.

**Jon Kelly** (2:52)
I know. Yeah, you were great, Peter. You came to his defense. I know. It is, yes, it's... I think that Dylan's done some incredible reporting, pointing out that some of the leaders of a number of troubled media companies weren't absolutely, totally brain dead, right? But had challenges and that... There was blame to go all around anyway. It was fun to see this turn into like a two-pock biggie sort of rap battle in the hands of our friends, Page Six Hollywood. But I digress, you know what's interesting about Sun Valley this many years in Peter? People forget that like Allen & Co. is one of the original boutique investment banks that organized this conference. And these are now ubiquitous, right? Like Aria has one, Alliantree, Raines got one.
Every single boutique merchant bank needs to convene. Jeffrey Katzenberg has his own. Allen & Co. got their first and theirs is the largest. And they did a lot of M&A deals, right? That was when media and cable in particular was one of the colossal growth engines of our economy.
The Allens were at the center of the action. In fact, my favorite anecdotes from this era of business is Barry Diller leaning over the shoulder of a young associate at Allen & Co. named Derek Kaso-Shahi, who was banking one of the businesses that turned into IAC, right? So what's interesting all these years later is that the Allen & Co. conference still has a taste of media, but is now, like everything else, completely a tech conference. Allen & Co. is obviously trying to be involved in or to insert its layer in those deals. And I think if you look at just the programming, as Dylan noted in the first couple of days of the conference, like it's Jeff Bezos talking about the economic opportunity of his intergalactic conquest into space, which is now going to be the, you know, I mean, I think everyone made fun of him years ago when the plebes didn't understand the financial opportunity. But now it's pretty clear that, like, there were a couple of deals that SpaceX and Starlink have made where we're going to have connectivity that's extra-terrestrial. We're going to probably have some GPU production down the line that's possibly extra-terrestrial. And very few people had the CapEx available to be able to start, you know, the picks and shovels in the outer atmosphere. And they're there. And then obviously all these other conversations that dominated the first day were about the most significant advancements in their frontier models. And I think that, you know, I encourage people to read Dylan because it has a lot of, like, very granular details of what actually happened inside the Lodge. But it was interesting how wonky some of these conversations got. I think that, you know, in particular, there was a chat between Satya Nadella and Reid Hoffman about AI that I think got into, you know, needed an AI translator for some of these people. But the other thing, Peter, too, just to round this out, like, last year, the big deal was, you know, the relatively small deal that David Ellison made for Barry Weiss. It was a, you know, a largely stocked non-figure deal. Cool, great for her, great for everyone involved. But I think what's happening this year is that no one's talking about deals, right? The Ellisons are mid-flight on their Warners' Conquest. I don't think the AGs are going to be able to stop them even if they try. The new discourse around Comcast is actually that, you know what, like, maybe even if they're setting this thing up to be sold, as Matt, you know, appreciantly noted a couple weeks ago, maybe there aren't that many bidders who want to have to take on less attractive parts of the asset like the local networks business, right? I don't think Netflix wants to do that. I don't think Netflix wants to deal with NBC News. So anyway, it's a tech conference now. Good for everyone. Everyone looks fit.