SUN VALLEY, Idaho — Tech and media moguls who gathered here for an annual confab this week sounded a mostly cautious note on the economy.
Big debts and still-depressed housing prices will continue to weigh on consumers, said Greg Maffei, chief executive of Liberty Media Corp., whose entertainment businesses include the Starz pay-TV channel and QVC shopping network.
“Most people here have consumer-facing businesses,” he said. “It’s not to say that the world is going to fall apart, but it’s going to be a long, hard slog.”
The resort in Sun Valley is host each July to a throng of CEOs, investors and entrepreneurs from the worlds of technology and media. While net worth among the gathered billionaires is almost certainly up from last year, the same economic jitters that have sent the stock market down lately were on full display.
Liberty’s chairman, John Malone, also worried out loud about the pace of economic growth, as did media banker Gordon Crawford.
That said, poor economic conditions haven’t necessarily stopped participants from plotting industry-changing moves.
In past years, the groundwork for some major deals has been laid here, including the pending takeover of NBC Universal by cable TV provider Comcast Corp.
As always, mogul sightings this year were bound to draw speculation about what might be brewing:
There was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg driving off with Eric Schmidt, chief of fellow Internet powerhouse Google Inc.
There was Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein chatting with Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Co., which has been trying to sell the company that Weinstein and his brother Bob sold to Disney in 1993.
Grandees from outside the media business also show up. Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett was there, as was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The conference is not known for producing big news. Its host, the boutique investment bank Allen & Co., is known for secrecy and keeps reporters mostly on the sidelines. This year prompted grumbling among the journalists, who were shooed from one designated area to the next and very pointedly kept out of the lodge bar.
Still, some moguls did stop to speak with the press, and they were mostly cautious on the economy.
Even Google, whose online search ad business has reaccelerated since the doldrums of the recession, confirmed the sense of economic malaise.
“The U.S. government withdrew its stimulus spending in March and June, and as a result, a set of indicators — retail, housing and so forth — fell off a little bit,” Schmidt said. “We don’t have any data that disagrees with that.”
