Handsome and charming, Iger was the Disney CEO who took a while to get off the stage and failed to groom a successor. And so, they pointedly tune out our shouts as they hop into an SUV together and later take a walk across the grounds.Īnother vaudevillian sight is the dance between Disney’s two Bobs, Iger and Chapek both are here but definitely not together. The culture at their company is famously machiavellian, and some wonder if one won’t attempt to throw the other overboard.
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Hollywood has been feeling Schadenfreude watching them squirm while Netflix’s stock is in free fall. In this year’s theater of Sun Valley, they constitute one of the juiciest acts. “Reed and Ted,” as in Netflix co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, were just here in the driveway a moment before. I think if we do quality content that people love - we’ve got to create more content that people will pay for before they’ll pay for dinner or they’ll rush home to see.” “ Stranger Things is a great, terrific show, and Netflix is a great company - Reed and Ted. We’re not going to look at the ratings and, in the long run, it’s going to be worth more.” Next question: Isn’t it interesting how Netflix, which made binge-watching part of its core DNA, has just experimented with its most cherished brand, Stranger Things, by dripping out episodes? Doesn’t that seem like a pivot to the kind of appointment television that Zaslav’s HBO still does? “I think we’re all going to experiment,” he says. I think it’s the greatest news brand in the world with the greatest journalists. I think you’re seeing more of that at CNN. America needs a news network where everybody can come and be heard: Republicans, Democrats. “I think Chris is doing a great job pivoting CNN,” he replies, referring to Chris Licht, his newly installed viceroy at Hudson Yards.
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I ask if he’s worried that CNN’s ratings continued to dip in June despite the January 6 hearings, which provided a bump but should have been like crack for its viewers. “Welcome to Sun Valley,” he says, flashing his gleaming chompers. (Thirty percent has been the number floating around.) Still, he’s ebullient as he greets Home Depot’s founding financier Ken Langone before the cameras, pulling him in for a hug and a peck on the cheek. Last year’s conference, which took place right as he was conquering those properties, might have been more fun because right now he’s got to focus on aggressively paying down the debt of his conglomerate, and sweeping layoffs are expected. He’s not the biggest kid on the block, but ever since he became the boss of Warner Bros., HBO, and CNN, he’s been having a ball. Most don’t want to play and dart straight inside the refuge of the lobby.īut not David Zaslav. This driveway is the stage upon which a mogul may perform, should he wish. There’s Warren Buffett in a hideous acid-yellow shirt and Jeffrey Katzenberg. There’s Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, and his NBC chief, Jeff Shell. The reporters - there are just a few of us - stay behind a short fence, watching as the Chevy Suburbans pull up to deposit their vested cargo. (Rupert Murdoch arrived the night before Elon Musk is expected to show before the end of the week.) Hey, look, Henry “Barbarians at the Gate” Kravis has just arrived and he’s unloading his own luggage from the back of his SUV. It’s just like a regular summer camping trip! Except the local girls they hire to babysit have to sign NDAs. But wait, don’t those John Lobb sneakers cost $780? They leave most of their toys at home (no to the chief of staff and army of lawyers yes to the Gulfstream), bringing other props instead (wives, kids, labradors). They dispense with their suits and dress in blue jeans, baseball caps, beat-up kicks. (They are, in fact, almost all men.) And here, for one amusing week, they pretend as though they aren’t so different. (This is where Jeff Bezos decided to buy the Washington Post and where Disney hatched a plan to gobble up ABC.) They are the media tycoons - the men who control what and how you read, watch, and click - and the men who finance those men. Did you fly private to summer camp?Įach year, the very richest in our society quorum at this lodge for a conference thrown by the secretive investment firm Allen & Company to strike deals. Hemingway first stayed at this lodge in 1939 and knew this town. “Yes,” said Hemingway, “they have more money.” “The very rich are different from you and me,” Fitzgerald observed. David Zaslav taking questions from the media pen.Īs I stood penned in with a pack of gossipy reporters outside the Sun Valley Lodge Tuesday afternoon, watching while a procession of billionaires streamed in, I was reminded of that apocryphal exchange between another couple of writers - F.
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