Apple CEO Tim Cook Attends Mogul Moot at Sun Valley

Apple CEO Tim Cook made a first-time appearance at the Sun Valley Retreat, an annual meeting of industry moguls named for the tiny town where it is held, Sun Valley, Idaho. Other attendees at this year’s event include News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, IAC chairman Barry Diller, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai, and many others.

Tim Cook at Sun Valley

Artist’s Interpretation of Tim Cook Nestled Among the Idyllic Mountains Near Sun Valley
Sun Valley View Credit: Shutterstock

Sun Valley Retreat is put on by Allen & Co., and it’s sort of a big deal if the net worth of you or your company exceeds that of a few score countries. It’s considered a place where industry titans can meet, greet, eat, and seat with one another to chat and maybe even make a few deals.

The late Steve Jobs attended the event in 2010 and 2005, and his limited involvement possibly being attributed to his health battle. It is, after all, a place where lots of media bigwigs hang out, and media deals have been an important part of Apple’s business for more than ten years now, but no Apple exec attended in 2011.

For Tim Cook, who took over as CEO of Apple in August of 2011, this is his first opportunity to attend the event as official boss of Apple, and it turns out he took the opportunity.

So what is he doing at the event? As you might imagine, reporters like to converge on Sun valley hoping to glimmer and glean what these executives are doing, who they are talking to, and what they might be saying. Also, as you might imagine, they seldom get much of anything.

For instance, The New York Times said that when reporter Evelyn M. Rusli asked Mr. Cook if he was looking forward to the event, he smiled and said, “I’m looking forward to all the private discussions I’ve set up this week.”

Which, when you get right down to it, is pretty darned funny. He was walking with Paul Sagan, the CEO of bandwidth king Akamai.

The New York Post got a slightly more informative answer, as Mr. Cook told that newspaper that, “We are talking to a lot of people here.”