Inside Sun Valley's 'Summer Camp For Billionaires'
The battle over the future of the Murdoch family's 21st Century Fox media empire was at top of mind for all the business moguls gathered at the 2018 Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Cheddar senior reporter Alex Heath went inside the ultra-exclusive, secretive confab and spoke with former AOL CEO Steve Case, Discovery CEO David Zaslav, and Y Combinator President Sam Altman, among others.
Aside from the future of Fox, the consensus at this year's "summer camp for billionaires" was that tech giants like Netflix and Apple are forcing legacy media players to consolidate their businesses and change how they deliver their content in the streaming era.
"Companies are trying to position themselves for a future where consumers are going to have more choice, more control, and more convenience," Steve Case told Cheddar. "It's going to move from more traditional distribution models ー cable ー into a much more digital model. Clearly, it was going to happen, it's just taken a longer time than we would have thought."
Alexander Mashinsky, the former CEO of the failed cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network, has been arrested on federal fraud charges, including wire fraud, according to CNBC.
Threads could bring in $8 billion in annual revenue, according to analysis, after it reached about 100 million users days after its launch. Cheddar News explains.
Celebrities, lawmakers, brands and everyday social media users are flocking to Meta's freshly minted app Threads to connect with their followers, including many Twitter refugees tired of the drama surrounding Elon Musk’s raucous oversight of that platform.
Comedian Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for allegedly using her copyright-protected work to help train their artificial intelligence programs.
