Sun Valley, the so-called summer camp for billionaires, kicks off this week in Idaho, and though it’s unfair to blame the conference for all of the problems plaguing the media business, it’s not a bad place to start.
The animating idea behind Sun Valley isn’t a bad one — bringing together top minds from the world of business, entertainment, politics and other fields in a free-flowing exchange of ideas can lead to unexpected collaborations and spark insights.
But in practice, it feeds into a perception among the billionaire set that they know better than the rest of us about, well, everything. That intractable problems in our education, healthcare and justice systems could all be solved if they were run like Amazon or Google.