Welcome back to In The Room. I’m Dylan Byers.

Tonight, news and notes from the annual Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley—a veritable billionaire summer camp with a not-so-subtle pecking order.

Personally, I’ve found that many attendees are still quite willing to meet, off the record, on the sidelines, here at Konditorei or under a quaking aspen, and that such a source-cultivating speed-dating exercise is far too valuable to pass up. Moreover, there’s always the occasional interesting tidbit from the inside: For instance, Marc Andreessen, the investor-entrepreneur and Meta board member, was on a panel with Peter Thiel this morning and issued a full-throated endorsement for the possible cage fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. It was, he said, a return to how humans have historically defended themselves, and he called for all parents to train their children in martial arts in anticipation of an increasingly violent and uncertain world. (That guy…) Both Andreessen and Thiel also strongly advocated that all the attending moguls homeschool their kids.

Meanwhile, Larry Summers offered some insightful observations about the increased value of E.Q., rather than I.Q., in an A.I.-driven world. Bob Iger will take the stage Friday, and will presumably be asked by Sorkin about the breaking news that he’s extending his putative two-year second run at Disney until 2026—itself a signal that the company’s challenges outweigh the talents and operating capacities of available successors. Some eagle-eyed observers said they could sense something was afoot as early as breakfast on Wednesday morning, and noted that this mid-July announcement was obviously timed to grab the Sun Valley spotlight.

His third segment leader, ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro, did not join him; no doubt he’s busy deftly managing the sports network’s uncertain future. This may mean nothing, or everything, but as one media executive and longtime attendee observed, everyone here “clocks who is sitting with whom... who is taking a walk or cycling with whom.”

Indeed, there is a veritable pecking order among all those in attendance: Everyone may be invited to the panels and the welcome dinner, but only the most high caste and influential among them are invited to Herb Allen’s condo on Thursday night for his private dinner. Others are dispatched to slightly less august dinners at restaurants in nearby Ketchum, which the conference books out for the night.

Offsite, Jeff Bezos hosts a highly coveted private dinner one night that only a fraction of the conference’s attendees are fortunate enough to attend. Before the pandemic, at least, one of the week’s big events was Zuckerberg’s Friday night karaoke party at a bar in Ketchum attended by many of the week’s most notable players, with the obvious exception of competitor-enemies like Tim Cook and Eddy Cue.

On that note, there is also the subtle tension that exists in Sun Valley between rivals who diplomatically greet one another by the Duck Pond but, beneath the surface, secretly despise one another. The most obvious example of this might be Iger and Brian Roberts, the Comcast chief who in 2018 was busy driving up the cost Iger would eventually pay for Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment assets. Last year, I recall, there seemed to be an awkward tension between Iger and his own hand-picked successor, Bob Chapek—tension that would spill out into public view after Chapek iced out his predecessor and was then himself defenestrated to make way for Iger’s return. Should Musk deign to attend the conference again this year—his eleventh-hour arrival was its own mini-drama last time around, complete with private jet monitoring—the tension between him and Zuckerberg is likely to be quite palpable. (They do have fighting gyms just south of here in Hailey, right by the airport, where the private jets are parked.)

So yes, even billionaire summer camp has a pecking order, and, as the aforementioned executive noted, “it pushes every button among this crowd of ultra competitive, status seeking, privileged titans.” But the crowd does come, excitedly and gratefully, every year. And indeed, no one’s power is on greater display here than that of the Allens, themselves.

For forty years, they have wooed the most powerful members of the business community to a weeklong working vacation in the Sawtooth, providing them with three hours of daily programming, the wealth of the area’s recreational activities (golf, tennis, biking, etc.), luxury accommodations, best-in-class childcare—one full-time counselor for every child, in fact, who can assist with water-rafting, horseback riding, etc.—and near-total freedom from the press. In exchange, the Allens put themselves at the epicenter of M&A activity for the biggest tech and media deals, with a nice cut on the backend. In recent years, Aryeh Bourkoff has tried to generate similar buzz for Liontree through his MediaSlopes event in Deer Valley; Jeffrey Katzenberg is trying to launch a similar annual confab in Montecito. Needless to say, it will take decades for anyone to rival what the Allens have built here, or incite a comparable level of envy.

One difference between this year’s event and the past, of course, is that the industry’s biggest players are also burdened these days by its biggest problems. Iger’s extension seems directly correlated with the size of his burden and debt load. David Zaslav, who ditched the ubiquitous vest for a wilderness-chic denim look, is also operating a debt-laden company that the market hasn’t quite made sense of yet. Roberts seems, perpetually, in deal mode. At Sun Valley, after all, M&A activity often happens serendipitously—the result of having the leaders of the biggest companies in the same place for an extended time. This year, though, the deals can’t come swiftly enough.