For all Trump’s success in winning back reluctant conservative billionaires,
many of them have seen firsthand the ways in which his erratic behavior
and anti-market ideas
could disrupt their businesses and the wider economy.

After Trump became President, he asked Schwarzman to enlist high-profile business executives to serve on an advisory council.

The participants included #Musk;
#Jamie #Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase;
#Mary #Barra, of General Motors;
#Bob #Iger, of Disney;
#Larry #Fink, of BlackRock;
and #Jack #Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric.

It was a perfect Trump setup:

the biggest brand names in American business would come to the White House,
kiss his ring,
and offer free advice.

But, as one of the panel’s members recalled,
the first session quickly devolved into an argument between Trump and several participants over his false allegation that China was manipulating its currency.

In the summer of 2017, following Trump’s comments about there being
“very fine people on both sides” of the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia,
the group convened an emergency call and decided to disband.

After Schwarzman conveyed the news to the White House, Trump preëmptively tweeted that he had decided to shut the group down.

Early this summer, Trump’s campaign surprised the Business Roundtable,
a members-only organization of corporate C.E.O.s,
with a last-minute acceptance for the ex-President to appear at the group’s quarterly meeting in Washington.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times’ financial columnist and a host of “Squawk Box,” on CNBC,
reported that even C.E.O.s at the meeting who were sympathetic to Trump had found the former President uninformed and “remarkably meandering.”

A source in the room told me that Trump’s digressions included complaints about his court cases and “crazy rants about Venezuelan immigrants.”

Soon after the event, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld,
a professor at Yale University who tracks the political preferences of America’s corporate leaders,
wrote in an op-ed for the Times that not a single Fortune 100 C.E.O. had donated to Trump by June of this year,
something he called a “telling data point.”

In fact, Sonnenfeld argued, the lack of giving to Trump from traditional Republican donors in the business community was the real fund-raising story,
“a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican Presidential candidates dating back over a century.”

Sonnenfeld told me that such giving “fell off a cliff” when Trump became the Party’s nominee
—going from more than a quarter of Fortune 100 C.E.O.s in 2012,
when Mitt Romney was the G.O.P. candidate,
to zero in 2016.

In 2020, he noted, only two Fortune 100 C.E.O.s had given to Trump
—someone in the energy sector who is no longer running his company
and #Safra #Catz, the C.E.O. of the Oracle software corporation.

One lobbyist who speaks with many corporate C.E.O.s told me,
“Unanimously, they hate the Biden Administration’s policies.
But I think almost unanimously they would much rather deal with that than the risk of catastrophic disaster from a Trump Administration.”

By fall, the only Business Roundtable member publicly backing Trump was Schwarzman.

Every year, some of the richest and most powerful leaders in business, media and politics touch down in Sun Valley, Idaho,
for a private confab hosted by New York investment bank Allen & Company.

The vibe is trail-dad chic — think puffy Patagonia vests and Apple watches and stealth-wealth cashmere pullovers. Imagine the resort from Dirty Dancing but replace all the beautiful young dancers with mostly older White men carrying Wall Street Journals under their arms and grumbling about regulatory overreach.

The summit’s agenda and lecture topics are kept secret, and reporters who attend generally have to stay off the record so that the one-percenters can mingle and speak freely as they wander the mountain resort,
gossiping about industry and, occasionally, forging historic multibillion-dollar deals.

Sun Valley is widely believed to be the place where Jeff #Bezos decided to buy The Washington Post, and the site of the meet-cute between Comcast and NBC Universal.
(Warren #Buffett, who is notably absent from this year’s guest list, once referred to Sun Valley dealmaking as ABWA, or “acquisitions by walking around.”)

This year’s parade of private jets is expected to touch down Tuesday, as the Idaho Mountain Express reported last month, bringing together dozens of power brokers
— including AI kingpin Sam #Altman; Disney CEO Bob #Iger and a coterie of his potential successors; plus all of the usual suspects like Apple’s Tim #Cook, Meta’s Mark #Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar #Pichai, media moguls Rupert #Murdoch and #Oprah Winfrey and many others, including David #Zaslav, the CEO of CNN’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, according to Bloomberg and Variety.
(A spokesperson for Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed Zaslav would attend.)

There are also some notably absent names from the guest list this year.

There’s Buffett, who is normally a fixture at the event but who is nearly 94 and, perhaps, happy to let his spryer successor, 62-year-old Greg #Abel, handle the high-altitude trekking and chit-chattery. Less likely but still half-seriously rumored is that Buffett is avoiding the shindig after the press last year picked up on his wife, Astrid, complaining about having to pay $4 for a cup of coffee.

Also absent this year is Elon #Musk, who might seem like a shoo-in until you imagine him winding up on a rafting trip with a bunch of CEOs whom he publicly urged,
less than a year ago, to go f— themselves.

While we expect plenty of chatter about artificial intelligence, the Succession-level drama about Iger’s succession plan, and the head-spinning negotiations that led to the Paramount-Skydance merger, there is one giant elephant — or donkey — in the room this year.

Questions about President Joe #Biden’s ability to campaign have wealthy donors and Democratic officials in a tizzy.
And it would be hard to imagine that a gaggle of elite media moguls would sit around the fire with their s’mores and bourbon and not speculate about potential replacements on the 2024 ballot.

That could make the week particularly important for three governors on the guest list this year: Gretchen #Whitmer, Josh #Shapiro and Wes #Moore, all of whom have been floated as potential Biden replacements, even as the president forcefully denies that he’s contemplating dropping out.

The political intrigue is, well, intriguing. But it’s also a timely reminder to zoom out and consider just how powerful the US has let its billionaire class become, and how events like Sun Valley amplify the inequities in America that are so systemic we hardly bat an eye at them.

As the writer Hamilton Nolan wrote in 2021, Sun Valley is a place where “the billionaires are feted by the mere millionaires; the millionaires drum up enough deals to allow them to buy their third and fourth homes …

This is the wondrous model of American capitalism in action
— a tiny handful of wealthy people eat cake, and an entire nation gathers downstream, hoping to snatch up a few falling crumbs.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/09/business/sun-valley-summer-camp-billionaires-nightcap/index.html