Comcast Split, Paramount-WBD Deal, AI Among Hot Topics As Media & Tech Moguls Hit Sun Valley Confab

The pine trees, hiking trails and white water in Sun Valley, ID look about the same as they did last summer. The media landscape does not. Boutique investment bank Allen & Co. has hosted the conference long referred to as summer camp for billionaires every year since 1983, but few editions have unfolded at a moment of this much change reshaping the business. In July 2025, as moguls gathered at the tony resort, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery had both announced plans to split, separating their streaming and studios businesses from linear cable networks. Skydance, meanwhile, was still struggling to close its acquisition of Paramount, and Disney’s board was pondering a successor to chief executive Bob Iger. This year, as a couple hundred private jets bearing media CEOs, tech titans, sports czars and thought leaders begin to touch down Tuesday for the confab, Comcast has done more than just spin off cable networks (into stand-alone Versant Media Group). The Philadelphia-based giant said last week it will split again, this time separating its broadband, cable and wireless operations from NBCUniversal and Sky. (In a subsequent capper to months of talks, Sky also clinched a $2.1 billion acquisition of major UK broadcaster ITV.) Watch on Deadline Comcast’s Idaho-bound Co-CEOs Brian Roberts and Mike Cavanagh have denied that the new split was driven by M&A considerations. (The maneuver is expected to be completed by Sun Valley 2027.) With the volume of media deals now at a multi-year high, many on Wall Street fully expect some movement on both or either company as a buyer or a seller. The NBCU-Sky entity, perhaps tellingly, will be run by Cavanagh, a veteran dealmaker with a finance background. (“We would not over-interpret Brian Roberts’ ‘absolutely not’ response to M&A questions,” wrote BofA analyst Jessica Reif Ehrlich in a recent client note.) As for Skydance, it closed on Paramount shortly after last year’s conference and is currently pretty far along in its massive, $110 billion acquisition of WBD. That combination took shape after Warner inked, then walked away from, a prior agreement with Netflix in a months-long pas de trois. Regulators in the UK and Europe are actively reviewing the transaction this month, with the timeline for their verdict uncertain, and state attorneys general in the U.S. are also mulling their legal options. The resolution and impact of the transaction, with asset divestitures and other twists potentially in the offing, will animate a lot of the conversations at Sun Valley. Press is not allowed inside the event, except for a handful of panel moderators tapped from the TV airwaves, but a flock of reporters still show up to shout questions at the valet line and try to outmaneuver the resort’s security guards. Sun Valley has been credited with hatching a number of major deals over the years, among them AOL-Time Warner, Capital Cities-ABC, Verizon-Yahoo and Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post. What happens far from the cameras and microphones, when CEOs raft, hike or share a private bite in between group panels and communal meals, tends to generate news – but usually well after the jets have departed. Josh D’Amaro succeeded Iger earlier this year as Dana Walden became chief creative officer, a new role. Iger, D’Amaro and Walden, along with fellow senior execs Alan Bergman and Jimmy Pitaro, were all at Sun Valley 2025 and all were invited back this year. As AI and tech execs continue their dance with traditional media, a question about co-existence was put into play early in D’Amaro’s new tenure 2026 with the dissolution of a buzzed-about partnership between OpenAI and the media giant. The question now is whether there can be a path to partnership, or is the creative community uneasy enough about the risks to put a damper on things? With all three major above-the-line unions reaching 4-year contract renewals this year with the studios and streamers, the threat of a labor impasse has diminished, at least for now. WBD CEO David Zaslav will be in attendance, as will Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch, often photographed on strolls at the resort over the years amid family drama, will be there along with COO John Nallen. Fox and News Corp Chairman Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, now 95, has been a regular. IAC’s Barry Diller is confirmed, and ditto for Sony Pictures Entertainment chief Ravi Ahuja and Sony Corp. CEO Hiroki Totoki. Cameras on Tuesday also captured, separately, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.