With Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook‘s retirement date looming ever nearer, you might imagine that Cook and CEO-in-waiting John Ternus may be hanging out together quite a bit. Well, that “hang” apparently includes attending this year’s Sun Valley Conference, according to Forbes.
The conference, held by boutique investment firm Allen & Co., gathers media, tech, and finance leaders together for a week of closed-door talks at the Sun Valley Lodge. This year’s event began on July 7 and is expected to run through July 11.
Cook and Ternus are attending the conference, alongside Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Chairman of OpenAI Bret Taylor, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. This nearly guarantees that several AI-related conversations will take place during the week.
This Sun Valley trip will be Cook’s last as Apple CEO. Apple announced in April that Cook will step down on September 1, with long time Apple executive John Ternus rising to the top slot.
In addition to Cook and Ternus, Apple SVP of Services and Health, Eddy Cue is also attending the conference, as he has for several year.
In addition to the above-named AI execs, several other big names are attending this year, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Sun Valley has long had a reputation as a place where deals get done, or at least are initiated, thanks to the event putting people who would not be likely to meet in person in the same room with each other. Talks about Disney buying ABC initiated here as did conversations that eventually resulted in Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post.
(Image credit: Apple)
